


Drilled Through Empty Spaces

by the_rck



Series: Not Ready to Swallow Oblivion [3]
Category: Sky High (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dark, Captivity, Emotional Manipulation, Ethical compromises, F/M, Lima Syndrome, M/M, Minor Character Death, Multi, Non-explicit dub-con, Non-explicit underage sex, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to Past Child Abuse, References to Torture, Stockholm Syndrome, Unreliable Narrator, Villain Warren Peace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-23 16:54:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14938209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_rck/pseuds/the_rck
Summary: "It'll be okay," Warren said. "Eventually." Warren had all the time in the world.Ethan had none. "Layla said you wanted pets.""You're people. I'm not going to forget that." Warren’s words had the weight of a promise he intended to keep. He met Ethan’s eyes. “If I don’t count the babies, I could lose most of a hand and still have enough fingers to count everyone who’s real. One hand for the five of us.”Warren’s mother would be on the other hand. His father might be but probably wasn’t. Nobody else was.





	1. Ethan: An Hour Too Soon

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Edward Hirsch's "Idea of the Holy."
> 
> I consider that anything sexual between Warren and his four prisoners is going to be dub-con no matter how much Warren wants it to be consensual or how long it goes on. Other people's lines may vary. All five of them are underage, and (by randomly assigning birthdays) I figured out that Warren is between 15 months and 20 months older than the others, so there's that, too.
> 
> The sex doesn't get more explicit than kisses, references, intention, and Layla and Warren removing their shirts, but characters do talk about sex, and it's clearly happening.
> 
> The characters are not any less in need of years of therapy in this branch of the AU; they're just not likely to get it. Ethan, Layla, Magenta, and Zach can confide in each other. Warren can't confide in anyone at all.
> 
> These chapters are ordered for making sense rather than in strict chronology. The first chapter here, for example, happens after the second, but the second is kind of confusing without it. Also, the chaptering here makes a bit less sense because Zach gets three, Layla gets two, and Ethan, Magenta, and Warren only get one each. The story covers a good bit more time than previous stories. Layla's second chapter and Warren's chapter are set about two years after Homecoming, and Magenta's is set a year after that.
> 
> Thanks to Karios and Elizabeth_Culmer for beta reading.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from Sara Teasdale's “Morning Song.”

**Tuesday 28 February 2006**

There were two places Ethan felt more or less safe with Warren. One was in the nursery rooms. Warren wasn't going to hurt anyone the kids knew, not in front of them, anyway. The other was the detention rooms. Ethan's power didn't work there, but neither did Warren's. Warren was still bigger and stronger than Ethan was, and the people carrying guns still answered to him, but there wasn't any fire coming from Warren's hands.

Ethan trusted the nursery more. He tested the detention rooms every time he went inside one. If his power didn't work, Warren's probably wouldn't. He was just more certain that Warren didn't want the kids scared than he was that Warren wouldn't lie to him.

The first time Warren took Ethan into a detention room, he said, "We'll be staying a while." He waved a hand to indicate the desks and chairs. "I'll get better furniture eventually, but other things are more urgent."

Ethan tried to shift and couldn't. He wasn't sure what he'd do if he was able to. Calling Warren on a lie wouldn't be safe.

Or might be safe but wouldn't mean Warren had to change a damned thing.

Ethan took a seat at the third desk in the front row. He wasn't surprised when Warren sat down at the first desk. The empty space between them was actually reassuring. Ethan put his hands on the desk and interlaced his fingers. "I'm not going to let the kids down."

"I'm not doing this for them." Warren's words were even.

Ethan thought about his friends. "I wouldn't abandon the other three, either." Which was, in a way, an admission that he could. He wondered if Warren would notice.

"Magenta's worried that you'll... hurt yourself."

Ethan spared a moment to hope that Magenta was just still covering for him in case he did decide to run. Claiming that he’d let himself slither down the shower drain had been an early idea for explaining his absence. He wasn’t sure that Warren would believe suicide now, but the possibility that Magenta might fear losing Ethan-- losing any of them-- that way wasn’t something Ethan could dismiss.

Ethan counted three breathes and focused on the fact that Warren cared more about what Magenta thought than he did about what Zach and Layla thought. As far as Ethan knew, Magenta was the one of the three who still wasn't making out-- or more-- with Warren. Ethan raised his eyebrows. "You think I'll help you get into her pants? Don't think so."

Warren laughed. "I don't think she will unless she stops hating me. That one's going to take a lot longer than this." In spite of the laughter, Warren sounded sad.

"She won't betray you." Not unless it would benefit one of her friends. If Warren didn't already know that, Ethan wasn't going to tell him.

Warren didn't say anything, so Ethan thought that Warren probably did know.

A few minutes later, Warren said, "None of you would betray the others. The real reason those three won't try to fuck me over is you."

What Warren could do to Zach or Layla or Magenta was limited by what their bodies could bear. It would end eventually. What Warren could do to Ethan--

Ethan managed to keep his body as still and his face as flat as if he hadn’t heard the threat in Warren’s words. He took a deep breath and tried not to wonder how long it would take for his mind to disintegrate completely if Warren went back to torture. "I think all four of us are clear that your dad liking you is all that's keeping those two dozen babies safe." He was proud that the words came out steady, even, as if Warren being willing to hurt Ethan wasn’t actually a thing that mattered.

"I'd rather you all actually liked me." Warren sounded almost plaintive, but Ethan knew that Warren understood damned well why Ethan didn’t.

Ethan turned to study Warren's face. "I know. I just don't know that you're getting that back, not for real. Maybe we'll all forget the not real part; maybe we won't." He was pretty sure that they were all-- including Warren-- going to make sure that Warren forgot. He supposed that stating it bluntly wasn't actually great strategy in that direction, but Warren would know he was lying if he said anything else. "Whatever else, you're not optional."

"We have time."

Ethan's stomach twisted as he realized that, while Warren didn't enjoy hurting them, he did enjoy owning them. He was enjoying the slow process of taking them apart. Warren thought they were real people with power and value, and Warren enjoyed the fact that he had more power than they did, that he could give them what they wanted-- or not-- could take anything at all from them.

Warren probably thought that the risk that one of them might snap and murder him added to the fun because finding the lines and staying on the right side of them was a challenge in a way that using his powers and acting the dutiful son never would be.

Ethan closed his eyes and swallowed hard. "Warren--" He shook his head because there really wasn't anything he could say or do.

"It'll be okay," Warren said. "Eventually." Warren had all the time in the world.

Ethan had none. "Layla said you wanted pets."

"You're people. I'm not going to forget that." Warren’s words had the weight of a promise he intended to keep. He met Ethan’s eyes. “If I don’t count the babies, I could lose most of a hand and still have enough fingers to count everyone who’s real. One hand for the five of us.”

Warren’s mother would be on the other hand. His father might be but probably wasn’t. Nobody else was.

Ethan supposed that that was better than what they'd get otherwise, so he asked the real question, "Why do you want me to know?" 

Because this was Warren. He had tells. He gave away more than he meant to sometimes, but he also never did or said anything without figuring all the angles.

"You respect honesty."

It wasn't actually funny, but Ethan laughed anyway. "Doesn't matter what I respect or don't."

Warren shrugged. "Easier to work on you than on Magenta."

Which was probably true.

"I suppose I'm less likely to decide that you're not worth it and stick something sharp into your back."

"She asked me to let her jump. I couldn't let her. I... would rather she have reasons to stay."

Oh. That was why Warren was pushing the rest of them harder than he was Magenta. Which meant he probably realized that Ethan wasn't suicidal. "We've all four been there," Ethan said softly. "I didn't put a knife to your throat because I was happy. Didn't do it because I was stupid either."

"I know." There was an odd weight to Warren's words that Ethan only realized later was desire. "That's why, no matter what anyone else thinks, you're not pets." He fell silent for a moment then went on, "It actually should have worked."

"It had a better chance than any of our other plans," Ethan said. "We had to try." He thought Warren knew that, but he also thought he needed to say it.

"I don't regret it." Warren wasn't talking about their escape attempt.

Warren was a liar, but Warren didn't know he was a liar. Warren really didn’t regret using threats and violence, didn’t regret any losses his prisoners had suffered. He did, however, regret the things he couldn’t get because none of them were going to forget what he had done, what he would never regret enough that he wouldn’t do it all over again.

They were all always going to love Warren the way Warren loved his mother. Warren sure as hell didn’t want that. He was just willing to settle.

Ethan thought this was probably another weight bearing lie, one he couldn't just knock out of the way without the roof falling in on them, so Ethan nodded and said, "I know." He fixed his eyes on his hands. "So what are we aiming for here?"

"I'd like to be able to touch you."

Ethan nodded again, just the barest movement of his head. This time, he couldn’t miss the desire in Warren’s voice. He supposed he should thank Warren for waiting because it very definitely wasn't that Warren _couldn't_. He considered a joke about Warren wanting the complete set, but it wouldn't actually be a joke because Warren did.

"The four of you are the first thing in my life that I'm sure was my own idea."

The truth and pain in that made Ethan shudder. He was pretty sure that Warren wanted that response. The honesty was bait, and Ethan was going to have to take it because Warren was the only clear path forward. Ethan's hands tightened on each other. "Things you said to Layla, things Magenta heard... All of that went that direction."

"So Layla told you." Warren didn't actually sound surprised.

Ethan gave him a sharp look anyway and said, "Layla does that. Assumed you knew." His hands tightened a little further. "Not like we didn't need to know."

"Having your escape succeed wouldn't have been better for me."

Ethan looked away, but he also nodded. "For everyone else, though."

"We still haven't found Magenta's bomb." It was almost a question.

Ethan had found it. Magenta'd told him exactly where to look. "Pretty sure it's Gwen's," he said. Lash had to have placed it because no full sized human could have gotten that deep into the rock. Gwen could have built something that could do it, but Ethan didn’t think she actually had that level of imagination. She’d have had Lash place it. "Bomb making's not a sidekick track thing."

"Would you like to learn?" Warren didn’t seem to be trying to hide the calculation in the offer.

"That seems like a terrible idea from your point of view." Ethan hesitated. "I'd-- we'd-- take lessons in just about anything, useful or not. Isn't that desperation part of the point of locking us in?" It was that part of things that had made Zach offer to cook, and all five of them knew it. Jobs, lessons, something with a point to it-- Four months after Homecoming, any of that would feel like freedom.

It wouldn’t actually be, but it would feel like that.

Ethan had left the bomb where it was because he didn't see anything to be bought by taking the last of Magenta's hope. She'd sworn that Gwen couldn't set the damned thing off remotely, and Ethan didn't think she was lying.

"That was a side benefit," Warren said. "It was better than the alternatives."

Ethan considered that. He couldn't quite put himself in Warren's shoes because Warren's view on the world was broken, splintered in ways that Ethan simply couldn't replicate. "I suppose it was," he said at last. "Better for cherished pets." He let bitterness into that.

"You wouldn't have enjoyed being anything else." There was something approaching warning in Warren's voice.

"I know." Ethan did know. "Just-- Me not putting a knife to your throat again doesn't mean I'm happy." Mostly, it meant that Ethan didn't have a knife. "We got one roll of the dice." Seeing fear in Warren's eyes again might still be worth what would happen after.

He knew it wouldn't be, but he hated knowing he was powerless. He also hated that Warren understood him well enough to understand that every bit of leverage Warren gave him was also leverage Warren gained in return. A foothold for a foothold, a hook for a hook.

Ethan wasn’t sure that even Magenta knew that about him. Even if she did, she wouldn’t have told Warren. Warren had got there on his own.

"If you were a different sort of asshole," Ethan said levelly, "Magenta'd have killed us all the moment she could."

Layla'd have done it sooner, but if Warren didn't know that, Ethan wasn't going to tell him.

"I'm kind of surprised she didn't."

"Magenta said--" Ethan wanted to distance himself from this information because, if Warren didn't know already, it was because Magenta didn't want him to. "--that, if it had just been her, she'd have knelt at Homecoming and meant it." He glanced at Warren and saw that he looked surprised. "What you took from her was different from what you took from me or Zach or Layla."

"She could have left you any time." Warren sounded as if he hadn't considered that before.

"You really think she couldn't now? It would mean killing you, but she _could_. You being dead wouldn't break her heart." Ethan thought that might be an understatement. He wouldn't be entirely surprised if Magenta fantasized about vivisecting Warren. "The kidnapping you part was entirely about the babies. She could have gotten the rest of us out with just Medulla’s guns.” He hesitated then added, “She didn’t tell any of us about the babies, not until that night, and then only me.”

“Suggestions for redirecting her?”

Ethan shrugged. “Haven’t come up with anything that’s possible and not worse.” Time travel would do it. He considered his words carefully. “Pretty sure the reason she hasn’t hurt you yet is that she doesn’t want to be a person who would. Not because she objects to being that but because she thinks we would.” He gave Warren a hard look. “You’ve still got all your body parts because Layla would be disappointed to find out that Magenta’s that vicious.”

Warren seemed to turn that idea over in his head. “But Layla knows.”

“There was a point when she didn’t.” Ethan massaged his right shoulder with his left hand. “You took that. Magenta knows that, but she doesn’t want to make any of us admit to knowing.” He sighed. “But she knew I knew when I wouldn’t let her hold the knife.” He looked at his hands again. “The rest of us…” he said softly. “The things you took from the rest of us started with things we already had, and we’ll always have had them. Everything you took from her was _possible_ , something she’d just started thinking she might get.”

Stability had been big. Being able to trust that the world wouldn’t fuck her over and that someone would always have her back. Having something to give and contribute. Having things that wouldn’t be taken away as soon as she started to value them. The idea that she could give something and not have to do without herself. Being able to assume that she’d have choices about her life.

Magenta still had bits of those things with Ethan, Layla, and Zach, just none of the parts about being who she’d prefer to be. The three of them were going to cherish whatever fragments there were, but those weren’t the parts that could work with Warren or the parts that could rip Warren’s throat out in order to protect the rest of them.

Warren had stolen Magenta’s chance to become the person her friends thought she could be. He’d taken it almost as soon as she’d accepted that it was a thing that could happen, as soon as she’d admitted to herself that her being one of the good guys was possible. She’d only just started thinking that she could have a place that was hers and based on things she wanted.

Warren inhaled sharply.

Ethan let every bit of anger he felt show in his face and body. “You could fuck her over worse with that information. I don’t think you want to, and you knowing might help, but-- If you hurt her that way, the rest of us will kill you. We’ll be _creative_.”

For a moment, Warren just stared at him. After several seconds, he started laughing. There was genuine amusement there but also grief and something wilder and angrier.

If Ethan hadn’t checked five seconds before to make sure that the power suppression effect was still working, he’d probably have cowered in a corner. Instead, he set his shoulders. “We can’t give her hope back, not any more. You--” He snorted, half humor and half contempt. “To give her that, you’d have to commit. Offhand, I can’t think of anything that would work that somebody--” He waved a hand to indicate the wider world. “--wouldn’t use against you.”

That Magenta would use it, too, went without saying. Her using it was the point. For hope, she needed agency.

“Zach glows,” Warren said softly. “You become a puddle. Magenta turns into a guinea pig. Layla--” He shrugged.

Even Layla didn’t know what Layla could do.

Ethan looked at the ceiling. “That’s where we started.” He wondered if Warren realized how telling it was that even Zach wouldn’t give him more information than that. “I heal now. But you knew that.” He tasted bile and had to carefully control his breathing so that he wouldn’t show any other sign of panic.

“I thought you were doing it deliberately. I’m sorry for that.” Warren sounded sincere, but Ethan knew Warren was a liar. “Magenta told me I was wrong. I should have realized that you weren’t that stupid.”

Ethan couldn’t say anything for almost a minute because he was choking on Warren’s assumptions. “You could have asked.”

“I should have,” Warren agreed. “Eventually, you’ll all have to tell me what you can do.”

Ethan was relieved to retreat from the previous topic. “It changes,” he said. “We all tried things that shouldn’t have worked. First time I healed was after I got my foot stuck in that damned water bottle. Broke some bones.” He hoped Warren would focus on the healing part of what Ethan could do. “I still don’t know where the hell my fillings went.” 

Ethan’s eyes also adjusted now so that he could see with his glasses on or with them off. At this point, the transition took less than a second. He was pretty sure that he’d be able to see in the dark before 2007. He wasn’t telling Warren about the vision changes, either.

Warren gave him a sharp look then changed the subject more completely. “I’ll get a TV and a DVD player put in here. Better furniture, too.”

“I’d rather have better furniture in the locker room.” Ethan regretted the words the moment they were spoken. The rows of lockers were still useful when Ethan went out to spy. Without them, his absence would be obvious to anyone walking in the door.

Judging by Warren’s smile, he suspected. “Cots would mean you’re all sleeping alone.”

It was enough of a question that Ethan thought that Warren wasn’t absolutely certain. “Not sure we could,” he admitted. He hesitated then added, “I don’t think that’s a fair thing to ask for.” He wasn’t talking about sleeping.

Warren closed his eyes. “Wasn’t planning to.”

Neither of them said anything further until Warren was ready to take Ethan back to the locker room.


	2. Layla 1: Give All You Have Been

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from Sara Teasdale's "Barter."
> 
> Layla's setting out to seduce Warren, so there are things in that direction. Also discussion of possible pregnancy and it being a bad idea and also of them maybe trying bondage at some future point.

Layla-- the Layla she used to be-- was dissolving. No one saw it because it was eating her away inside because Layla saw the price coming, the price for keeping everyone-- everyone but her and Warren-- safe. She wanted-- She wanted two things she didn’t think she could have, not at the same time. She wanted to be Layla Williams, a normal teenager who was just trying her best. She also wanted to step forward and make herself a warrior, to stand as shelter for everyone who needed it. To be that, she’d have to give up Layla Williams to be someone-- something-- else, something not human and much more powerful. No softness, no mercy, just the weight of necessity and power over the biosphere.

No normal person could carry all of that, not a planet down to each molecule, but Layla could see an open doorway to apotheosis. She didn’t want it. She really and desperately didn’t, but it was there, and she would step through if she had to. She thought there were good things on the other side. They just weren’t human things. The possibility that tempted her wasn’t the One Ring-- at least, she hoped it wasn’t-- but it would still make her beautiful and terrible the way Galadriel had chosen not to be.

Life, after, might-- No. Certainly would be-- better for most people. In some ways. She could see the shape of it, almost. It was more of a guess, both a hope and a terror. The Earth would have a mind and a will and a focus, and it would all be Layla. She could feel the Earth calling to her through the air between Sky High and the surface. If Layla extended herself, she could--

She didn’t want to be the Earth, but she could-- From the edges of the atmosphere to the molten core. She could. She was sure of that much. She probably wouldn’t be able to reach into space, not even as far as the moon, but she didn’t know.

And, really, space was too big for even what Layla suspected she might become. The biosphere was, too, if she was honest, but parts of it wouldn’t need all that much attention. Most of the bits that didn’t do what they were supposed to were human.

Maybe she could walk through that doorway and still have Agape, but she wasn’t sure.

A guardian warrior should love what she defended but… not too much and not any bit of it above the rest. Attachment led to the Dark Side. She’d always thought Yoda was full of crap, but maybe Yoda and “The Cold Equations” were what the people she loved needed.

If they needed it, didn’t she have to provide? There was a way forward that would let her do it. She only had to take the leap and accept the price, whatever it might turn out to be.

She just wasn’t quite ready. She thought the moment of transformation would be terrible. She’d know what she was losing but not yet be beyond the point where the loss stopped hurting. It was still a choice, and she wasn’t sure any of the others could understand, not when she didn’t quite, herself.

She almost walked through right then, just to have it done. Then she stepped back, physically and mentally. If she made the choice now, she’d be doing it entirely to protect twenty seven people from Warren Peace.

Not the world from Barron Battle. Not the world from starvation or ecological disaster or alien invasion or...

Just protecting twenty four babies and her three friends from Warren Peace. Warren was-- Layla didn’t know enough about Warren, not about the parts that mattered to her, but he was a sixteen year old boy with a broken mind and a lot of power. Layla Williams ought to be able to manage him and still remain human.

Maybe, if she was older, she’d see it differently, but Warren-- She might still be able to work with Warren. She didn’t know how far she could go that way before the option of apotheosis vanished, but she had time enough to try to find out what Warren could offer.

 

**Tuesday February 21st 2006**

Layla didn’t eat anything at all the day she planned to kiss Warren. She probably could have choked something down, but she was worried that it would come back up at an inopportune moment.

He took her to the nursery most days. He’d even leave her there sometimes. They hadn’t discussed it, but she stayed and didn’t wander farther than the nearest bathroom. She might still have been able to figure out a way to get her friends and all twenty four babies to the ground, but she’d been watching CNN. She wasn’t sure there was a safer place for the babies.

Maybe there was if Will was still alive, if no one… unfortunate… had found the Stronghold cabin.

Getting everyone to the ground in no way provided transportation once they got there. She and her friends could hide. She and her friends and a lot of not quite toddlers? Not so much.

And kissing Warren wasn’t going to be about him believing that she loved him. It was going to be about Sylvia Peace’s spies believing it. Layla wasn’t sure yet how Warren’s mother was going to die, but she was sure it was going to happen.

Before any of the kids turned three.

She’d asked Warren for Elsevier database access. He’d had no idea what the hell she was talking about, but he found someone who could create logins for several different universities that offered remote access. That gave her more than Elsevier.

She supposed she shouldn’t have assumed that he’d buy her a subscription.

This particular day, when Warren came to escort her back to the locker room, she looked at him and said, “Can we get tea or a Coke or something?”

Warren gave her a carefully appraising look. “Cafeteria? Or… I have an electric kettle in my room. Earl Grey or instant coffee.”

Layla didn’t enjoy bergamot, but she didn’t think she’d actually drink much anyway. She licked her lips. “Your room.” She felt her stomach dropping through the floor and reminded herself that she wasn’t committed yet.

She hadn’t seen Warren’s room before. Once she stood in the middle of it and looked around, she knew she still hadn’t seen Warren’s room. All of the personal touches belonged to other people.

Well, probably no one else used his toothbrush. She just knew that he took the first package to hand when he needed a new one. He wouldn’t even check the color.

She walked over to the window. “If you put a shelf here, you’d get decent light. I could suggest a few things that wouldn’t need a lot of attention.” She looked over her shoulder and smiled.

He smiled back, but it wasn’t his genuine smile. She’d seen that a time or two, often enough to learn the difference. “I could make this hard,” he said softly. “I don’t have to. You don’t have to. We can still have tea. Or not.”

She looked out the window and gave herself three seconds to pretend. “I could wade,” she said, “but the water’s icy. Step by step will hurt more than diving in.” And the door might swing shut at any moment.

“Ah.” He didn’t add anything for several seconds. “Will it be easier if we have tea?”

“I don’t know.” She really didn’t. “This sort of thing… There’s a class for seniors on… flirting… with villains.”

He made a startled and kind of appalled sound.

She turned to face him. “What? It’s a thing that happens to sidekicks. Traditional perils for traditional rescues.” The traditional stuff was bullshit, but knowing what might happen was a thing that sidekicks needed. “They put it senior year so they can pretend that nobody younger has ever heard of sex… or rape.”

“Is that what this is?”

“No.” She shook her head and took a deep breath. “At least--” She shook her head again. “This is me trying to find a way to be okay.” There had to be a way to remain human. She hadn’t realized before quite how badly she wanted that. She hadn’t let herself.

“I’m willing to help with that.” His smile was a little more genuine this time. Not much. A little. He waved a hand. “Chair or bed?”

If she sat on the bed, he could-- probably would-- sit next to her. “I’m not going to attack you.” She wanted that out in the open.

This time, his smile was real. “If I thought you would, we’d be somewhere else.”

She shrugged. “Realistically? At this point, the kids have be at least a decade older before I can kidnap them. You’ve got that long to convince me I shouldn’t.” She didn’t have to give him that time. It was a choice, but telling him that would only get her lies.

Or, worse, drive her to power without a chance to say goodbye.

He started laughing. When he stopped, he said, “That’s a hell of a non-sequitur.” 

“Only if you weren’t paying attention.” She managed a little tartness in the words. She nodded firmly and walked over to sit on the edge of Warren’s bed. She looked at him. “Ten years is a very long time.” She wasn’t completely sure she remembered anything from when she was four.

Her mother would tell her that fourteen was too young for seducing anyone.

Her father would tell her to protect herself however she had to.

Neither of them had told her where the lines needed to be for protecting other people. Layla would have to draw those herself. She was nearly certain that, either way, she had lost her parents already.

Warren sat down on her right.

She wondered if he actually understood what fast growing roots could do to rock. She wondered if he needed to know. “There are lines,” she said. “There’s a point when it all ends.”

“Magenta’s bomb?”

She dug the fingers of her left hand into the bedding then pried them loose, one by one. “No.” She didn’t elaborate. “Magenta’s lines are in different places than mine.”

Warren was a big boy. He could do his own research. Books and films and journal articles would only tell him part of the risk, but he could find that part himself.

“Are your parents going to visit?” She hadn’t meant to ask, but she actually needed to know. She felt Warren’s body go tense.

“Neither of them have said anything about it.” He shrugged. “Not planning to introduce you unless they ask.” His left hand touched her right, very tentatively. “I didn’t think we’d have this long. Especially not after--” He shook his head.

After his prisoners almost killed him in an effort to escape.

Layla had already apologized. She’d meant it at the time.

It hadn’t stopped Warren from hurting her.

She shivered and reached for her awareness of the plant life outside the window. “How far south did you take us?”

He squeezed her hand. “I actually went east. The island’s got freaky levels of climate control. We won’t get snow unless I figure out how to change the settings.” He hesitated. “Are the plants out there things that would survive that?”

Layla reached farther. “Most of them. It would be harder because they’ve never had to.” She considered. “The things nearer the edges would die. That seems backwards. It’s more likely to get cold out there, just normally. I suppose, if they die, you know the climate control is breaking.” She thought she could tweak those plants so that they wouldn’t die, but she wasn’t sure if she should.

“Is that just from walking out there?”

She met his eyes. “Do you actually want to know?”

“Yeah.” For a moment, Warren looked very like the kind boy she’d met at the Paper Lantern. “I’m not sure I’d tell me, but I’m curious.”

She smiled. “I’m a sidekick. I declined to show off for power placement, so… Obviously, I have no power at all.”

Warren leaned in and brushed his lips against hers. Then he pulled back and studied her face. “Obviously.” He brushed fingers along the side of her face. He laughed. “I can work with that.”

For a moment, she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Then she leaned into his touch. “Warren--”

“I will do what I can for all four of you.”

She almost believed him. She wanted to believe him. If she stayed human, there wasn’t a lot she could do if he was lying. There were ways in which she wouldn’t let herself be monstrous. She wasn’t going to look at mind controlling fungi. Never.

But she was pretty sure that she’d read about such a thing once. If she gave up being Layla, she might stop caring about becoming monstrous.

“But it’s not a trade.” His words were just a little harder. “I want you, all of you, but I’m not buying you.”

Layla considered calling that bullshit, but she realized that it would be easier if she didn’t. She lowered her eyes. “Today, it’s whatever you want.”

“That’s kind of a stupid offer,” he told her. “I want everything.”

She counted as she inhaled then said, “I’m offering. I… won’t stop you.” She was pretty sure he’d understand the ‘won’t’ as not meaning ‘can’t.’

“I’d rather be doing things you actually want.”

She almost believed him. She wanted to believe him. She closed her eyes and let herself be the grass outside the window. There was danger in doing that but comfort, too. It promised an after when none of this hurt any more.

She felt Warren stand and move away. Judging by the sounds, he actually was heating water.

“There’s not much I won’t give to keep what I can,” she said. “What I might give-- I’ll lose it anyway, and there’s not much difference-- from my point of view-- between you watching the water rise and taking what washes up after versus you just taking it all as the price for pulling me out. I lose it both ways, but one way, I drown.”

“I’m not letting you drown. Not any of you.”

Layla opened her eyes and fixed them on Warren. For the briefest moment, she let the green in her soul reach outward. She wasn’t sure if Warren would understand what he was seeing.

He flinched, and one of his hands ignited.

She let the power go and watched the flames dance on his fingers. “I’m not drowning the same way the others are.”

He exhaled, and the fire went out.

“I’m not sure I’m human any more,” she confessed.

“Keeping you inside is doing damned all, isn’t it?” He studied her as if she were a puzzle

She supposed she was. She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never done this before. Maybe I’ll take root. Maybe I’ll starve in here.” She thought her balance was shifting toward the things that didn’t need sun. She was still green, but the green was rainbowing and fading at the same time. She didn’t know if that had opened the door or if it would only, eventually, close it. “You pushed us all.”

“That wasn’t my intention.”

She rather thought that it had been. She thought he was simply discovering that he didn’t like the results as much as he’d hoped. No, he’d succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. He was just realizing that the results weren’t even remotely _safe_.

And he had no idea at all what she might become.

“I suppose I should be glad you’re not Magenta.” His smile almost hid his wariness.

“I wasn’t going to tell you.” Anything she told him was something his mother might persuade him to tell. She hadn’t known she was going to show him the green fire. “But I think I am drowning. I don’t know how much longer Layla will still--” She shook her head. “I’m not sure if it would be better or worse if we were on the ground.”

Warren sat on the chair by his desk. He didn’t say anything until the kettle boiled. “Tea or coffee?”

Layla hesitated. “Tea,” she said after several seconds. The tricks she’d used for brewing poisons would probably work for avoiding the bergamot. She wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before.

She was pretty sure that it was because filtering tea was harmless. Most things she did with her power were weaponized.

“Years ago,” she said as she stared into her cup, watching the water slowly darken. “Many years ago, I read a one-off comic. A bunch of heroes were trying to get at something that was destroying reality. Along the way, each of them found the thing they wanted most. One of them got through, of course. It wasn’t that sort of story.

“I just never forgot-- There was one hero who realized what was happening and stripped herself of everything in order to keep the road open for that last hero. It was what she had to do in the face of… everything, and it was a choice she made. She chose the part of herself that could give up everything it had-- or might ever possibly have-- for everyone else.” Layla used a tiny bit of power to keep the bergamot from releasing anything at all into the water. It took so very little.

“I would prefer not to be her, not unless there really is no other way forward.” She frowned at Warren. “For twenty seven people I love, I would, but I’d rather not.”

Warren’s inhalation was audible.

“Convince me that I can trust you for that much.” That was, Layla supposed, the difference between her and Magenta. Layla still might be convinced.

And Magenta would have only counted three people worth the sacrifice.

Layla wished that Warren were the sort of person she wouldn’t feel guilty about loving. She was going to if she took the more human path. She knew that. She’d probably always hate him, too. It was just going to be a dull ache, kind of like her grandmother’s arthritic knees, instead of the sharp slashes of rage that Magenta clung to.

“Don’t tell the others that part,” Layla said softly. She studied Warren’s face to see if he understood, but his attention had turned inward.

He didn’t say anything for several seconds. Then, he inhaled as if he were steeling himself. “We could… How do you feel about bondage?”

Layla blinked then shrugged. She’d already told him she wouldn’t stop him. Then she realized that Warren’s hesitation was mostly because he had no idea what to do with her. She was a sidekick. She wasn’t supposed to be more powerful than he was.

“Are you sure?” Warren sounded as if he really wanted to know, as if what she wanted mattered. “Better to change your mind now than later.”

Layla met his eyes. “If I don’t hurt you, it’s because I decided not to. Ropes, cuffs, whatever, won’t matter. Just me and you.”

And Ethan and Magenta and Zach and twenty four babies. Layla wondered if Warren would think that was better or not. So many people there, in the room with them, without being there at all.

“It’s all games and symbols,” she added softly. “If you think it’s hot, that’s enough.”

His smile looked a little odd. “I don’t… Not today. Anything we have on the island is aimed at being real. I think it’s a way for you to trust me. One you can offer, and I can honor.”

One that also wouldn’t change a damned thing. They both knew that.

She was also pretty sure, given the number of minions Warren currently had, that somebody on the island played bondage games and would loan or give them something they could use. Either Warren didn’t realize-- which seemed unlikely-- or he understood that she really wouldn’t want to let something like that touch her. She probably wouldn’t catch evil from padded handcuffs. Probably.

Loathing Warren’s minions was much safer than loathing Warren. Less complicated, too.

He took one of her hands and raised it. She expected him to kiss it, but he didn’t. Instead, he turned it over and traced the veins in her wrist. “You look fragile,” he said. “You’re not, but you look it.” He raised his eyes to her face. “I like that part, too. Sometimes, I’m glad to be wrong.”

His fingers felt strong on hers, and she wondered if she’d ever stop associating that grip with agony. Then, she realized that he was testing her by reminding her. She hadn’t killed them all then, and she suspected that Warren wasn’t sure if it was a choice she’d made or simply that she couldn’t have managed it. 

Then. 

“I’m not going to forget. None of us could.” She was almost certain that, if she tried to pull away, he’d let her.

He kissed the palm of her hand. “I want you, not just power over you.”

She didn’t try to tell him that there could have been a world where the power over wasn’t a factor. She knew he wouldn’t— couldn’t— accept that as possible, and, really, he was right. He’d never been anyone who could have that or who could give that to someone else. She had been; he hadn’t.

“You’ll get that,” she told him. “From me, from all of us, but it will be because, not instead.” And that was why she didn’t want to become the Earth. Not all at once. Not by taking one step and transforming. It was too close to becoming Warren. His invulnerability only came from not caring. 

Maybe she could find a different, longer path.

The doorway started closing. She shut her eyes against the fading light and the immense temptation to hurl herself through while she still had the chance.

Warren’s fingers circled her arm, right over the scars. He squeezed lightly and didn’t release until she flinched. “I know.” His face said that he’d take the no-sugar, no-fat, no-flavor kind of love because there wasn’t anything else. “I’m so very tired of being alone.”

She didn’t believe his momentary vulnerability, but she also wasn’t going to say so. If he wanted that, she’d pretend it was true. 

He might be lonely, but he wasn’t vulnerable over it. Not in the slightest. No more than she was helpless.

Right now, Warren Peace was much safer as his mother’s son than as Layla’s anything. He didn’t enjoy the cost of that safety, but it was better than his current alternatives. From his point of view, a goddess who used to be Layla might be better than anything her human self could offer.

But she’d just given up the easy path to that. If it had even been real.

She pulled her hand from his and focused on the immediate and necessary. “No pregnancy. No more babies.” She met his eyes because she needed this point to stick.

“You’d be safer.”

“I’m fourteen,” she told him, “and even without that, I wouldn’t be. She’ll be interested in that, and we’re really very boring otherwise.”

Warren looked a little startled.

“I’m not stupid, Warren. I thought about that. I thought about both your parents. It’s a terrible idea.”

He started laughing. “So pragmatic.”

“But not wrong.”

He didn’t answer for a few seconds. Then he shrugged. “No, probably not.”

She was a little surprised to realize that he regretted her being right. Then she understood— It would have been a bond between them that she wouldn’t cut, that none of them would. Everything since Homecoming had compressed the four of them, as a group, so that they’d never be separate again, and any one of them would be a parent to the others’ children. 

If Layla had… changed… the other three would have been her archangels. If she’d asked them to be. She wasn’t sure she would have. The whole point had been to take the burdens off of them.

She studied Warren’s face and realized that Warren still wanted the ‘yeses’ from the four of them to be real. She supposed that Ethan would call this a weight bearing lie-- Warren needed that the ‘yes’ to be real, so he couldn’t look at the parts that contradicted the yes any more than he could think about the choices and actions that betrayed his mother.

She hoped that he knew that he could only force things until he hit the point when Layla was willing to go nuclear. She’d straight up told him that there was a point when that would happen. 

Warren just didn’t know what ‘nuclear’ meant for Layla, and she doubted he was thinking on the right scale. He probably thought strangling vines rather than disintegrating island. He pretty certainly wasn’t thinking about inhaling a poison she pulled directly from the air.

Mass murder was always going to be an option for her, but she’d given up the quick route to godhood. She wouldn’t know where her tipping point-- ethically or in terms of achieving power-- was until they got there. She wondered if it what she still could become would blindside Warren the way her having powers at all had to begin with. 

She thought she was giving more than fair warning.

She made herself smile. “It’s okay. You’re… attractive.” She’d always thought so. Maybe she could forget the rest for a while.

Zach had assured her that Warren was gentle physically. For this, at least. “He wants us to enjoy it, to want it,” Zach had told them when he admitted that he’d started making out with Warren. Zach had been adamant that it was his idea and that he hadn’t planned it. Given that Zach said he’d first kissed Warren on Valentine’s Day… 

Well, Layla had doubts about lack of premeditation. She also hadn’t been sure how Zach could generalize out from just his own experience, but at this point, she was pretty sure Zach was right.

“Will you hold me?” she asked.

Warren pulled her in close so that her head rested on his shoulder. His arms wrapped her upper body, and one of his hands started rubbing her back. He rested his cheek on the top of her head.

She smelled his laundry detergent and his soap. She smelled heat rather than sweat and found herself wondering if he actually perspired. He might not need to. All of which was much safer to think about than what she was doing and about to do, what she was risking, what she had already given up.

But being Layla was always going to be better for her than becoming a god who wasn’t Layla. Like Galadriel, she would allow herself to diminish. She wouldn’t go into the west, but she had still chosen to remain herself rather than reach for power.

For all she knew, it might actually have been the One Ring waiting for her. She hadn’t really understood the temptation of that before.

She sighed and closed her eyes. She couldn’t quite make herself relax, so she started rubbing his back instead. If he thought she’d like it, maybe it was because he did. After several seconds, she slipped her hand under his shirt.

Warren’s skin was warmer to the touch than Magenta’s or Zach’s, and both of them tended to be warmer than Ethan, not a lot but some. Layla thought that Ethan’s body temperature might be affected by his power. She supposed Warren’s was, too, just in the other direction.

“I like that,” Warren said.

Layla didn’t need any translation to know that that was a question. Warren wanted her to tell him what she liked. She could avoid it because he hadn’t explicitly asked, but if she did, he’d take that as her not wanting to go forward, not right now. She bit her lip then hoped that he couldn’t tell she’d done that. Then she pulled back just enough to pull her shirt off over her head. She left her bra where it was.

Warren smiled. “Do you want my shirt off or on?”

It would be so easy to pretend that it all really was up to her. She wanted that as desperately as she wanted to have stayed home the night everything went wrong.

She wasn’t entirely sure if that was Homecoming or the night she met Warren at the Paper Lantern. She supposed it didn’t matter because she’d undo either if she could. Both would be far too much to wish for.

“Off,” she told him. “Just that for today.” Once he’d removed his shirt, she leaned against his chest again.

“Why didn’t you fight when I burned you?”

She flinched and tried to pull away, but he held her.

“Maybe the better question,” Warren said quietly, “is how did you manage not to?”

She forced herself to go still as she understood that him not letting her go was another-- very successful-- attempt to frighten her. “I suppose,” she told him, “that ‘playing with fire’ is the very definition of what you do.” She made the words as tart as she could manage and was pleased when he laughed.

“If you were going to kill me, it would be more likely over Ethan than over this.” His arms loosened a little.

She shrugged, more to test whether he’d let her move than because she wanted to convey meaning. 

He wasn’t wrong, but it also didn’t matter. 

“We’d all die. I just… I might have if you’d kept on. I told you--” Warned him, really. “--I have a line.” It wasn’t a line Warren would cross, whatever he might think. It was Layla’s personal event horizon. What Warren had done to Ethan had come very, very close to pushing her over. “We’d all die,” she said again. “Magenta wants that, but the rest of us didn’t.”

She wasn’t going to tell him that all of them dying wasn’t the worst thing that she thought might happen. That door might open for her again if Warren pushed her.

Warren’s arms tightened minutely then released almost immediately.

Layla interpreted that as Warren wanting to keep all four of them in spite of all the risks. She knew they wouldn’t survive without either that or her finding apotheosis, but she hated him for it anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two things here-- I'm not firm on the question of whether or not the door Layla saw was a real thing. She is absolutely on a road to really terrifying levels of power, and maybe there was a way for her to just grab it right then if she was willing to sacrifice herself for it. Layla's not as damaged as Magenta thought she would be, but Layla's also not anything like okay.
> 
> The superhero comic that Layla mentioned is a reference to an X-Men standalone that I read in the 90s. Wolverine saved the universe. Psylocke (Betsy Braddock) gave up everything in order to let him get there. Everyone else got trapped in dreamworlds that gave them their hearts' desires. Psylocke's part has stuck with me even though I remember very little about the rest of that issue.


	3. Zach 1: Spend All You Have

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Sara Teasdale's "Barter."
> 
> Thanks to donutsweeper for beta help on this chapter.

Managing Warren’s supplies and all of the necessary maintenance for Sky High gave Zach a lot more power than he thought Warren realized. Magenta and Ethan understood. Zach suspected that Layla didn’t, not quite, not yet.

Layla was too busy figuring out what she was, and Warren was too busy trying to figure out Layla.

Ethan thought Warren knew what he’d given Zach but didn’t let himself know. He thought it was another thing that Warren lied to all of them about. Ethan’s ideas about Warren almost made sense when Ethan was talking but really didn’t when Zach tried to think about them properly.

Zach spent a lot of time studying Warren’s minions. He was pretty sure some of them needed to go as soon as he could manage it. Not because they were spies but because they looked at Zach and his friends and fantasized about Warren withdrawing his protection from the sidekicks. The minions all thought they’d enjoy their own opportunity to torture people who couldn’t fight back. 

Magenta said that the ones who saw the danger of the four of them and their influence on Warren needed to go first, but Zach disagreed. Magenta hadn’t walked the halls without Warren. Also, Magenta was less easily cornered than Zach was.

Glowing would do damn all to help him escape if someone wanted to hurt him.

And Zach wondered if anyone was going to be smart enough to realize that Warren’s pets were going to be more than that. Magenta thought they would, but most of them hadn’t quite gotten to the point of realizing that Zach controlled the payroll records. Zach had only recently managed to get a lot of them to understand that he decided who got clean sheets and towels.

Zach didn’t try to starve anyone, but he could. There would be a point when certain people only got the burnt stuff. He rather thought that making everyone keep kosher for Passover had made a point about his control of the kitchen. Doing it had been a comfort for him, but it had also made an unmistakable point about his power, his very mundane power, that some people had previously overlooked.

It had also maneuvered Warren into committing to protecting Zach’s Jewishness in a way that a private observation-- even with Warren attending the Seder-- wouldn’t have. A way that Hanukkah in the prison of the girls’ locker room hadn’t because the actual test was Warren backing Zach against the thugs when they complained.

Zach and his friends needed to know if Warren wouldn’t.

Warren hadn’t seen that coming, apparently, and hadn’t been entirely pleased by the surprise. For about fifteen seconds after Warren had realized, Zach had braced himself for repercussions, for having Warren try to take this, too.

Then Warren had smiled in that way he had that made him look like he thought reality was optional and said, “I can give you that.” His smile had gotten tighter and harder, and he’d flexed his fingers. “Some of the assholes are getting on my nerves, too.”

Warren hadn’t killed anyone, and Zach kind of hoped he wouldn’t, more because Zach thought that Warren getting into the habit of killing casually would be bad for Zach and his friends than because Zach had any compassion for anti-Semitic criminals. Then again, killing ended things. Someone alive might try for revenge, and Zach was always going to be the softest target.

If anyone hurt Zach-- any one of the four of them-- physically, Warren would probably kill in retaliation. Even the stupid thugs knew that. This just made the point that there might be non-physical attacks that Warren considered equally bad. Zach thought that it said a lot about the low quality of their staff that most of the thugs didn’t realize that ‘equally bad’ would be measured by how Warren perceived Zach’s distress and that that perception was a thing Zach could alter. 

Warren wasn’t going to demand proof if Zach reported harassment or showed up with his face streaked with tears. Warren also wouldn’t give a damn if Zach was lying about the specific offense. Zach was real and precious to Warren, and quite apart from that, Zach was doing work that was more valuable to keeping Sky High running than what any other single person was managing. Warren actually needed Zach in order to survive.

Zach just knew enough history to be really fucking careful about how he used that. If Zach was dead, Warren’s retaliation would do damn all to help him recover.

*****

Zach still hoped he could get rid of the deadweight on the staff without violence. He wasn’t going to fire anyone. Not yet. Warren’s father’s people on the ground and Warren’s mother’s people on the ground were watching Zach for any sign of treachery, and direct firing would be evidence that Zach was allowed to make important decisions. None of them really thought that Warren was micromanaging Zach, but they all thought Warren was paying more attention to things like that than he was ever going to.

Mainly, Warren was going to do whatever he thought would let him stay on Sky High. Somewhere in Warren’s head was the realization that, if he was too good at running the place, someone-- his father, his mother, the Queen of Sheba-- might demand that he go run some place more important. And probably more vulnerable.

Zach was pretty sure that Warren was scared of leaving. He could do it. He would do it. He just wouldn’t feel safe when he had to. Which… Well, being Barron Battle’s son was never going to be safe.

If Warren could buy her a year or three, Layla might be able to hold Sky High and protect the babies, but Zach was 99% sure that Warren didn’t know that. Zach wasn’t sure _Layla_ knew that.

Zach was sure, though, that Layla didn’t want to have to.

If Zach hadn’t already known that Sylvia Peace was a terrible person, he’d have guessed it from interacting with her minions. Warren’s mother’s people were paranoid shits who thought that no member of the family should be disturbed by trivialities but also thought that making the wrong decisions had to be blamed on someone else. Zach took that as them expecting that someone would take the fall for even small things.

Zach might have assumed that was just a thing about working for a supervillain, but Warren’s father’s people had more certainty that they were allowed to make decisions and would survive at least some mistakes. Zach had no way to tell if they were wrong, but he suspected that they weren’t, so he went to them rather than to Warren’s mother’s people when he actually needed something.

He had no interest in being thrown under the bus.

He was almost certain that the two groups despised each other. Warren’s parents’ minions weren’t warring in the streets, but there was a shit-ton of backstabbing between the factions. Zach was playing stupid about that. Not to Warren, not to his friends, but definitely to anyone trying to feel him out as a potential ally or catspaw. Mostly, Zach told Magenta so she could track the factions without him having to juggle another set of spreadsheets.

He was pretty sure, too, that she was making a hit list. She probably wouldn’t go and kill those people, but planning how they could was good practice for the one murder they were going to have to commit.

Letting Sylvia Peace stay alive was like eating potato salad that had been sitting in the sun on a picnic table. Waiting longer wasn’t ever going to make any part of it safer. 

She might visit any time.

Zach felt more than a little guilty at being relieved that there was no chance he’d have to be the one to do the job, so he started tracking where Warren’s parents were and gathering information on where they stayed and who they saw.

Warren didn’t want to send his mother flowers or chocolates or anything at all, so Zach did it for him. Zach tried, a few times, to write thoughtful notes to go along with the gifts to Warren’s mother. Most of those ended up deleted without being sent because Zach had no idea what would please the woman without upsetting Warren. The notes he did send seldom went beyond ‘Thinking of you, love Warren.’

The ‘thinking of you’ part was almost certainly true.

Gifts to Warren’s father were harder. Warren hadn’t ever thought to find out what his father liked in terms of food, movies, clothing, etc., so Zach had to try to come up with ideas. He was pretty sure that neckties and golf balls were right out. All Warren offered in that direction was, “He really likes seeing things blow up and hearing people scream.”

Which was neither helpful nor reassuring.

Zach had made plans for dealing with a visit from either of Warren’s parents. For Warren’s mother, the main thing was to keep her from meeting Layla before Layla had a chance to kill her. They couldn’t afford to risk waiting, though, not if she came to Sky High, because she would certainly fuck with their minds, probably not as badly as she’d done with Warren’s, but even a little would be too much.

If Zach could do what Sylvia Peace could do, one of the first things he’d do on meeting someone was to order them never to harm him.

None of them wanted Layla’s responsibility to be obvious, but they’d all rather deal with the fallout from having succeeded than the repercussions of not even trying. They were almost sure that Warren wouldn’t kill any of them.

Barron Battle, on the other hand, well… They didn’t know. They hoped that Warren’s affection for them would protect them from Barron Battle if anyone found evidence against them. But that might require Warren taking a real risk and trusting them to back him.

Zach was very definitely not thrilled by the prospect of depending on Warren’s mental and emotional stability. Zach was loyal to Warren. Mostly. He just also knew that Warren would hurt him if the alternative was in any way inconvenient.

 

**Friday 21 April 2006**

Warren’s father visited six months after Homecoming, a few days after Passover ended. He brought half a dozen people with him and gave Warren three days notice. That was enough time for Zach to get everything clean and to order carryout for that day’s lunch and dinner. His people could cook adequately, but ‘adequately’ wasn’t good enough for this.

“Magenta will stay with me,” Warren told Zach. “Layla and Ethan will stay in the nursery.”

Zach took that to mean that Warren didn’t entirely trust Barron Battle and his people. Putting Layla in the nursery meant Warren thought there was a chance that someone would attack it. He closed his eyes for a moment. “I’ll get by,” he said.

Warren was probably also thinking that Magenta would be much less likely to lose her temper and kill or maim someone if she stayed at Warren’s side because it was a lot less likely that anyone would be an asshole to her just for the hell of it.

Warren was seriously underestimating Magenta’s self-control, and it would leave Zach flapping in the wind, unprotected by anything but his wits and his self-control. He understood the logic of it. If Warren had asked Zach’s opinion, he’d have suggested the same in terms of who went where. He just didn’t want to be so vulnerable.

Ethan could keep Layla from any sort of pre-emptive action if someone she didn’t recognize wandered past, looking for the bathroom. She probably wouldn’t attack anyone even without Ethan there, but he had to be somewhere, and Ethan would feel safer with Layla in the nursery. 

Zach would have, too, but one of the four of them had to be obviously working independently to show that Warren wasn’t wrong to trust them. Zach was the most likely to not attract attention by showing powers he wasn’t supposed to have.

Because he didn’t have any. He could glow brighter now, but he’d never managed anything but cold light.

Magenta made a better bodyguard. Compared to Zach or Ethan, anyway. They weren’t going to spend the secret of Layla’s power on keeping Warren from bleeding, and none of them trusted anyone who didn’t live in the girls’ locker room to protect Warren.

“I’ve told my father you’re really fucking useful.” Warren smiled at Zach. “He approves of that.” He put his arm around Zach’s shoulders and squeezed. “He’ll probably try to scare you to see which way you’ll bend.”

Zach really didn’t like the sound of that, but it wasn’t as if he was going to have any choice.

“I’m pretty sure,” Warren said softly and directly into Zach’s ear, “that he’s going to be looking you over to see if you’re good enough for me.” He almost laughed. “Pretty sure, too, that he won’t think any of us realize that. He thinks we’re children.”

That sat there for a few seconds before Warren went on. “I don’t know him well enough to know what questions he’ll ask.” Warren hesitated then added, “Any spies who haven’t noticed how much time I spend alone and private with each of you-- Well, I don’t think any of them failed to draw conclusions from that or failed to pass those conclusions on to my parents.”

Zach couldn’t stop a sharp inhalation. Parents. Plural. “Is your mother going to visit, too?”

“Not this time.” Warren’s voice tightened. “She’s offered to… help you adapt.”

Zach swallowed hard in an effort to settle his stomach. “Please, don’t.”

Warren pulled back a little to look at Zach’s face. “I want _you_. Not someone who only looks like you.”

Zach made himself cuddle close and relax against Warren’s side. “Thank you for that.” Zach had no illusions that Warren wanting them as they were would be even the slightest protection if his mother wanted to meet them.

Zach sighed and asked Warren about something he might actually back Zach and his friends on. “You realize that your parents’ people are sure we’re temporary. They think you’ll get bored with us and let them play.” He felt a sudden spike of heat through Warren’s body. Zach closed his eyes for a moment. “It’s not… Nobody’s done anything.”

Warren clearly heard the unspoken ‘yet.’ 

Zach hesiated. “Well, nothing you need to notice. Nothing I can’t--.” He turned his head against Warren’s shoulder. “They’re not _quite_ that stupid.”

Warren made a sound of acknowledgment, and Zach wondered if he realized the various petty ways that Zach could currently answer harassment. “You will tell me, right?”

“Magenta will.” Zach sighed. “The new hires are better because they actually get that I could fire them.”

“I’d let you fire any of them.” Warren was lying, and they both knew it. Too much depended on keeping his parents convinced that he was obedient.

In the next year, either one of the assholes would kill Zach, or Zach would get the last of them off of Sky High. Zach wasn’t entirely sure what would happen when the least imaginative of the idiots finally understood that he could retaliate for even the smallest bits of nastiness. Some of them might take it as a contest they could win and fail to see that victory would be a pit stop on the way to hell.

Zach was more worried about Warren’s mother’s people in that direction than he was about Warren’s father’s people. Zach was almost certain at this point that Warren’s mother had been running scared for a decade. She could have pulled off the jailbreak without Royal Pain. Without Warren even.

Much as Zach had liked Mrs Stronghold, she was one person. There was a lot of shit in the world that she hadn’t had time or other resources to investigate. Making her an immovable barrier to supervillainy was ridiculous, especially with the powers Sylvia Peace had.

If she’d just moved to another city and changed her name, Jetstream wouldn’t have been able to find her. Her new i.d. could even have been real because she could make people forget things and put other memories in their place. Zach really doubted that an average DMV employee or courthouse clerk had any way of resisting that.

Driver’s license. Birth certificates. Leases. Financial history. It all just took the right people putting in names and numbers. Even Will could have done it.

At any rate, because Warren’s mother didn’t understand efficient application of force, her people tended not to, either. Zach suspected that she selected for that when she hired. Or maybe she just changed her people to fit.

The way she’d kept changing Warren.

Warren’s parents had to have better quality spies available, and really, who needed more than about three spies for a place this small? Three from each of Warren’s parents would be considerably less in the deadweight department. Zach was pretty sure it would be easier to teach the cooks to fire guns than it was to teach the thugs to cook.

Zach sighed. “A panic button wouldn’t be a bad thing.” The chances were good-- Magenta agreed with him-- that anyone who thought killing Zach would solve a problem would want to take their time doing it.

“I’ll have that for you by tomorrow morning.” Warren smiled at Zach. “You got a little time for me right now?”

Zach always had time for Warren, so he knew what Warren was really asking. “Half an hour before I need to check on anything, so yes, if we’re quick.” He knew that part wasn’t too difficult. They were both still new enough to sex to find drawing things out more difficult than getting it all done fast.

Layla and Magenta were working on teaching Zach to take his time. Neither Ethan nor Warren minded if the whole thing was fast or slow as long as it was mutual.

Zach nuzzled Warren’s neck and was, once again, grateful that fucking Warren didn’t mean cutting himself off from the people he really loved.


	4. Zach 2: The Breath of Intervention

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from Kamilah Aisha Moon's "Coup in Progress."
> 
> This is right after the first Zach chapter, but lumping them together makes for a much longer chapter than any of the others in the story.

**Monday April 24th 2006**

Barron Battle dressed in red and black, a combination that made him look a little like a stage magician but a whole lot scarier. He was slightly taller and heavier than Warren and wore a goatee. The moment he entered a room, even the least sensitive people knew he was dangerous.

Zach was pretty sure that was some sort of low level psychic thing or maybe one of those sounds that people can’t quite hear but sense as wrong anyway. Whatever it was, everyone in the cafeteria knew who the apex predator was, and Zach wanted very badly to press up against Warren’s side the way that Magenta could.

As far as the spies were concerned, she was the one Warren had started fucking first. He was making a point about her still mattering to him, about him not having dropped her just because he had other toys.

Zach thought that Warren underestimated Magenta’s control. She was certainly going to knife someone one of these days, but it wouldn’t be tonight. It would be calculated so that she wouldn’t have to do it more than once, and she’d use a knife because she didn’t want the spies to know she could gut them without one.

That Warren let Magenta carry a knife meant that he really did understand how utterly fucked the rest of them were if he got himself killed. That would protect Warren from Magenta for a good long time. 

Zach doubted anyone on the island right now intended to attack Warren, but establishing Magenta as eye-candy today might help later on.

Zach had had Layla look at the food when it arrived. She’d said that there wasn’t anything in it that shouldn’t be, not that she could spot. They’d both known that there were things she wouldn’t spot, but the odds were good that someone trying to poison them all would have put whatever it was into at least one of the vegetable dishes. 

Zach would have put a different poison into each dish, assuming he had access. Well, he _wouldn’t_ because Warren wouldn’t benefit which meant Zach and his friends wouldn’t benefit, but if Warren had wanted to poison people and didn’t expect to be sharing the food with them, Zach would have dosed everything.

Zach had only slept the last two nights because he’d talked Warren’s doctor into giving them all something that would help. He’d spent the entire morning fussing over details that-- probably-- no one else would notice, even if they were wrong. That, at least, gave him something to do besides curling up in a corner and hyperventilating.

Once Barron Battle arrived, Zach was busy making sure that everyone got fed. When he had time to think again-- the very moment he did-- he found one of Barron Battle’s people watching him from one of the doors to the kitchen.

The woman didn’t blink. The only movement she made was crooking a finger at Zach.

Part of him hoped that she was just playing with him because he was vulnerable, but he was pretty sure she wasn’t. Warren’s father wanted to test Warren’s housekeeper. Zach inhaled slowly as if that might melt the ice in his guts. He tossed the dish towel he was holding to one of his assistants and walked toward the woman as if he didn’t know that she was a murderer.

Every person Barron Battle had brought with him had enough of a reputation that Zach knew their names. This was Wendy “Windy” Endicott. She could pull the air out of a person’s lungs. She could also glide if she started high enough. It wasn’t real flight, and she didn’t like to be reminded of that.

She’d spent years in the same prison as Barron Battle.

Zach didn’t bother hiding the fact that he knew she was dangerous. He knew that he was fragile, too, knew that there was damn all he could do to protect himself. He followed as she strolled into the hallway. He wasn’t surprised that it was empty.

“You’re the boy who glows,” she said. 

He was, so he nodded. He tried not to let her voice and intonation remind him of his Aunt Eloise, the one who’d married his Uncle Jacob when he was ten. He hoped his aunt and uncle and their son were okay. His cousin, Mark, was two.

She didn’t say anything else for several seconds, just studied Zach’s face and posture. Then she gave him a thin smile. “You’re not shitting yourself, so there’s that.”

He had no idea how she expected him to respond to that, so he didn’t. He stood and waited for her to tell him why she’d called him over. He felt like all of the parts of himself that experienced emotion were draining away. He only had the faintest glimmerings of satisfaction at the realization that he wasn’t afraid any longer.

She stepped toward him and grasped his chin.

Zach let her turn his head so that she could study his profile.

“You boys fucking?” She sounded casual, but Zach was pretty sure that she hadn’t done anything so far that wasn’t very, very deliberate. She dropped her hand.

Zach made himself meet her eyes for just a moment. “Not sure it would be your business either way.” He kept his spine as straight as he could. One of his hands started to clench, but he forced it to stillness.

She laughed in a way that offered not an iota of reassurance. “Show me your wrists.”

Zach raised his hands. His scars were visible because he’d worn short sleeves under his jacket and then removed the latter so that he could deal with dishes.

She whistled. “Must have hurt like a son of a bitch.”

He hesitated for a moment then shrugged. “That was pretty clearly the point.”

“You’re not hiding them.”

He heard the question in the statement and shrugged again. “Everyone knows. That was the point, too.” He kept his voice neutral. “It warns everyone who sees it.” His right hand circled his left wrist before he let both arms drop.

“Think he’d do that much to protect you now?”

Zach made a show of considering that. “Against his father? Doubt it. Against you? Maybe. Depends on his father.” He raised his chin a little in a calculated challenge. “Less important people? Probably. It’s up to him, not me.” He let his voice become thoughtful. “He’d kill me slowly if either of his parents asked. Not for anyone else, though.”

She studied him for almost a minute.

He was numb enough not to crack under it.

“Is dying a thing you want?” The question was almost gentle.

Zach managed an almost smile and waved back toward the kitchen. “If it was, I’d have managed it.” He thought he had wanted it once, but that was distant. It would hurt later to remember the parts of himself he’d lost. Right at that moment, though, nothing much mattered but holding steady.

“Do you want anything?”

“Sometimes.” Zach’s answer was honest for the question she was actually asking. He still _could_ want things. He still did occasionally. Most of the time even.

“Did he rape you?” She sounded horribly casual again.

Zach gave that a few seconds before he said, “I don’t think so.” He shrugged. “Definitions of that are…” He waved a hand to indicate vagueness. Then he found the words he needed. “ _He_ doesn’t think so.” He took a deep breath and pulled a little of himself back out of the hole it was hiding in. “In my place, with what I’ve got, would you do different?”

Her face relaxed a little, losing some of its hardness. “Probably not, kid.” For a moment she almost looked like she felt sympathy. Then her expression closed again. “All three of you look really fucking young.”

And she hadn’t seen the other two.

That was another statement that was impossible to answer with anything but a shrug. “I need to make sure dinner’s ready.” He’d certainly stay if that was what she wanted. There were a lot of things he’d do if that was what she wanted. He just wouldn’t warn her about the list that his friends were keeping, the list of people who needed to die.

Ms. Endicott would go on the list of people Warren didn’t need and didn’t give a damn about. Unless she actually hurt Zach. Then, she’d go on the list of people that Warren actually wanted dead. She’d come in far below Sylvia Peace, but everybody did.

As if she’d read his mind, she asked, “How much do you know about Warren’s mother?”

He had to strain to hear her, so he suspected that she knew the question was as dangerous for her as it was for him. He couldn’t quite keep his wariness from showing. “Warren can’t say what her power is,” he said softly. He put the slightest extra emphasis on ‘can’t.’ Either she’d hear it or she wouldn’t. “But people talk. Can’t say I want to meet her. Couldn’t say I wanted to meet any of you.” He let a little of the steel under his bitterness show.

Her laugh was sharp and loud. “So there is something left of you after all.”

“A little,” he said. He studied her face and decided that she didn’t know-- not for sure-- what Sylvia Peace could do. Which might mean that Barron Battle also didn’t know. He gave himself three seconds to consider then said very softly, “Warren backs up his diary about sixteen different ways.” 

‘Sixteen’ was a wild assed guess. It might be more. It might be less. Giving a number, any number, sounded more sure.

She nodded slowly, and Zach wondered if she was looking for the holes and snares in her own mind. He and his friends at least had the comfort of knowing they’d never met the woman.

“She can’t read minds,” he said and then wished he hadn’t. Knowing that might be dangerous if it got back to Barron Battle.

She gave him a hard look then nodded. “Thank you for that,” she said. “We weren’t sure.”

Zach wondered if ‘we’ included Warren’s father, but he kept his tongue still and just returned stare for stare. Maybe Zach wasn’t the only person wondering about that decade of hiding. Maybe Zach wasn’t the only one who’d noticed that Sylvia Peace’s minions were terrified of making decisions.

She worked her jaw for a moment then asked another question that was almost too quiet for Zach to hear it. “How bad is the damage? To Warren, I mean.”

Zach stared at her. That wasn’t a question that was safe even for thinking about, not unless it was him and his friends in the locker room office.

“You can answer me, or you can answer my boss.” There wasn’t even a threat in there.

Zach cleared his throat. “Before Homecoming-- When he looks at that, there’s only one decision he made that he’s sure was real and his. One. In sixteen years.” He was pretty sure that none of his friends would have answered, and he wasn’t sure whether or not it would be a good thing that he had. He had a sick feeling that Warren wouldn’t approve. “He’s sure he’s real. He’s sure she’s real. We might be. The babies probably are. The rest of you… not so much.”

She looked appalled for about a second and a half which Zach took as evidence that she understood. Knowing that he wouldn’t have to explain further eased his nausea immensely. He was also oddly relieved to have someone else-- an adult someone else-- know.

“I can’t fix it, kid.”

“I know,” Zach said. He hesitated. “He’s also… He’s a _sophomore_. Asking him to run a place like this with four freshmen and a shit ton of spies really isn’t fair.”

This time, she took about thirty seconds to stop laughing. “What’s your name?”

“Zach.” He wasn’t going to offer his family name. She might connect it to his parents, to his little sisters.

“So, how bad are the spies, Zach?”

“Some of them are dumb enough not to realize that I decide which bathrooms get toilet paper.” He managed something that was almost a smile and was pleased when she laughed again.

She said when she stopped laughing, “Our people-- the ones on the ground-- said you were sharp. I’m glad they weren’t wrong.” She hesitated then added, “I’ll tell Barron that we want to keep you. Better someone useful than--” She shook her head.

Zach swallowed hard because that meant something.

Ms Endicott’s expression sharpened just a little. “The girl he’s holding so tight is pretty.” It was a question without being a question.

Zach hesitated. Explaining Magenta was too much like selling her out. “Magenta,” he said. “Her name’s Magenta.” His jaw clenched as he considered what to say. “She’s fourteen, but she’ll be as hard as you are some day.” He made himself meet Ms Endicott’s eyes with a little bit of challenge. “When she hurts somebody, it’ll be because it needs doing, and she won’t hesitate.”

“To protect the rest of you?”

“Protecting Warren does come down to that.” Zach was pretty sure that neither Ms Endicott nor her boss would believe him if he said they all adored Warren. He didn’t want to do it, but he asked, “Are you needing to meet Layla and Ethan?” Anyone Zach recognized, Layla would, too, but, if Zach took the woman to the nursery, Layla wouldn’t kill her the moment she walked in.

Otherwise, Layla wasn’t likely to take a risk with what she knew Windy Endicott could do, and that would give away part of Layla’s powers.

“I’d be happy to introduce you.” Zach was entirely certain Ms Endicott recognized the lie, but she nodded rather than calling him on it, and he led her to the nursery wing. 

When they got there, Layla was pacing the hall. The air felt heavy and thick. When Layla saw the two of them, she glanced at Zach then nodded.

Some of the pressure in the air eased.

Ms Endicott frowned and narrowed her eyes slightly.

Zach kept his face blank as he cursed internally. “Ms Endicott, this is Layla. She’s really good with the babies.”

“I’ve met your mother.” Ms Endicott’s tone was utterly neutral.

“I know,” Layla replied. “Mom thought I’d come into powers, so she told me a lot about the business.” She smiled with that Mr Rogers look that she sometimes got and added, “Coach Boomer was so very judgmental about powers.”

Which, Zach had to admit, wasn’t a lie.

For the first time, Ms Endicott looked baffled. She eyed Layla. She turned and looked up and down the hall. Her fingers twitched, and the air rippled. She frowned again. “There are a lot of plants in here.”

“None of them are toxic.” Layla sounded very earnest about it. “I researched all of them. Studies show that children are healthier if they have access to nature, and we can’t take them outside until we can keep them from falling off the edge of the island.”

“It’ll be months yet,” Zach put in, “and they’re mobile. We get them all outside for a little bit each week, just a few at a time, but it’s not enough.” He made himself sound apologetic instead of earnest. Better to leave the earnestness to Layla.

Ms Endicott still looked like she knew that something was off. Then she made a sharp noise and turned as Ethan stepped out of the playroom.

Ethan had one of Medulla’s guns hanging from his belt, but instead of reaching for it, he raised both hands. He also raised his eyes and looked at Layla. “Company?”

Layla laughed, sounding a little breathy. “Yeah. Company.”

Zach wasn’t sure if Layla was overplaying it. “She’s more interested in us than in the babies,” he told Ethan. He was entirely sure that Ethan knew that part already, but there was a risk of them looking too smart, a risk of Ms Endicott or Barron Battle thinking they were already what they might be some day.

Ethan gave Ms Endicott a wary, measuring look.

“Air manipulation,” Zach said. “She could kill all three of us. Without touching any of the babies.”

Except that Ethan didn’t need to breathe in his other form. “That would be really unfortunate for us,” Ethan said. He lowered his hands to his sides but didn’t let either go near the gun. He waved the hand on that side and said, “Sleep ray.”

Ms Endicott nodded.

Zach thought she approved of Ethan which meant she hadn’t noticed that his hands were trembling. Later, months later, he understood that she’d approved of Ethan because he knew enough to be afraid. She’d dismissed Layla because Layla appeared unafraid. Ms Endicott took it as willful ignorance rather than as an indication that Layla was certain she had enough power to win if it came to a fight.

Not all of Layla’s attacks were airborne-- just the most toxic ones-- but Ms Endicott might not realize that she needed to filter the air all around her body rather than just what she breathed. While the plants in the hallway really weren’t toxic, they were strong. At this point, Layla could control every plant in the hallway, simultaneously and with lethal precision. She said it was because of so much time working with millions of tiny things all at once.

Layla frowned at Ethan. “I still say it’s unsafe to have that thing in a room full of almost toddlers.” She sounded prim and judgmental, and Zach was really glad that she’d realized that her not being armed was a thing Ms Endicott might notice.

Ethan didn’t quite roll his eyes.

“This is Ms Endicott,” Zach told Ethan. “With Warren’s father.” He nodded at Ms Endicott. “That’s Ethan.” 

She looked at Ethan then at Layla and finally at Zach. “I’ve seen them.” This comment, too, was utterly neutral. “That’s all I needed. Come on, kid.” She turned her back on the three of them and started walking away.

Zach looked at Ethan and shrugged. He didn’t do more than glance at Layla because he was 99% certain that Ms Endicott was watching through the vibrations in the air.

Layla gave Zach a bright smile and a little wave as he left. She actually moved each finger separately.

Zach really hoped Layla wasn’t overplaying the airhead thing. 

Once they’d turned the corner and passed four classrooms on each side, Ms Endicott slowed and looked sideways at Zach. “If we tried to take the kids, Warren would fight, wouldn’t he?”

“I don’t know.” Zach really didn’t. “He’d expect us to, though, and if you try to _hurt_ them, he’ll probably do his damnedest to kill everyone on the island really fucking fast.” He let the last few words be hard and sharp.

“He trusts the four of you more than the rest of us.” She sounded thoughtful.

“For that, he does.” Zach wasn’t going to claim that Warren trusted them for everything or that he was wrong not to.

“Because you’re real?”

Zach shook his head. “Because he knows the things we’ll give him and the things we won’t and how to turn some things from one thing into the other. There’s a lot of shit he doesn’t know anything about, but he does know people.”

Ms Endicott didn’t have more questions for him, so Zach went back to the kitchen. He never told anyone about the parts of their conversation that touched on Sylvia Peace or on Warren’s sanity.


	5. Layla 2: Turned Her Heart So It Read Closed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Walter Dean Myers's "William Riley Pitts, 42, Jazz Artist."
> 
> There's murder in this one.
> 
> I haven't pinned down the exact dates for this because those matter a great deal less the farther out we get from Homecoming.

**October 2007**

Part of Layla wanted very badly to find a forest and wrap the life in it around herself for a while. She just knew that she didn’t have time. Getting to where Sylvia Peace was staying was going to be hard enough. Layla only had money to spend because her father hadn’t closed her emergency account. She hoped it wouldn’t break his heart when she went back to Sky High.

Maybe she could call him. Maybe there was a pay phone somewhere that would work. She thought those still existed in some places. But he wouldn’t be at home any more. The only number she knew that might still be good was for the Stronghold cabin. Talking to Will would hurt more than not talking to her parents.

Will wouldn’t understand. Her mother wouldn’t understand. Her father would understand, but he’d think she was wrong.

Spending fourteen hours on a crowded bus with a three hour layover in the middle was the purest hell. The only benefit was that Layla added some interesting new molds to her collection. Nothing she planned to use to kill Sylvia Peace was native to Sky High. She’d gotten into the habit of collecting anything new she encountered in hopes that the eventual trail would be much muddier. She hadn’t thought of long trip buses before, not as resources for anything but safe(-ish) and anonymous transportation.

Very few villains were interested in the sorts of people who rode buses. Layla gave it another six months before enough people figured that out to make buses become attractive targets. Then, there’d be a few weeks or months until the villains noticed, and then, nothing would be safe that way.

At least collecting mold made people avoid sitting next to her. Mold spores in the amounts she carried tended to be invisible and much easier to hide on her person than seeds, but invisible wasn’t quite the same as unnoticeable, so she mostly relied on seeds and whatever was in the air around her. Seeds didn’t tend to make her smell quite so peculiar.

On this trip, even before she started collecting, she’d smelled just odd enough for people to think she’d used a perfume that really didn’t work with her body chemistry. She’d considered carrying everything in vials, but vials had to be opened before their contents were useful.

Not that anyone but Warren was going to look at Sylvia’s death particularly hard, and Layla wanted him to-- needed him to-- guess. She hoped desperately that he hadn’t punished the others for her absence. They wouldn’t tell him why she’d left because they weren’t sure he could let her do it. He probably couldn’t locate Layla, but he could warn his mother.

If Layla had to spend weeks or months trying to find Sylvia-- Well, none of this would work at all. The only ways Layla could track anyone involved either communicating with Sky High or… talking to Will.

Lying to Will.

Sylvia was at a spa. She’d been there for three days. A location like that made everything easier and harder. There were so many different places to put the contamination.

And so much less cover for Layla’s presence. So much greater likelihood that some camera or another would catch her face or her scarred arms. Taking down the monitoring would attract too much attention. If she had to kill someone again-- as long as it wasn’t Barron Battle-- she’d have Warren and his resources on her side. Cameras wouldn’t be a problem then.

She changed her clothes in the restroom of the bus station. She wore a long, light coat over everything so that the maid’s uniform wasn’t as obviously a uniform and so that her scars didn’t show. Finding something that would pass for the uniform hadn’t been that hard, but her i.d. badge was kind of terrible because Zach simply hadn’t had the resources he needed to make it. It wouldn’t work if anyone looked at it closely, but it had a big green sticker on it that said ‘Trainee,’ and a lot of the maids wore them at waist level. Layla thought that that and caution would let her pass. She wouldn’t need to be there long.

If she’d been willing to kill everyone in the place, it would have been so much easier. That would take her about ten minutes to set up, and she could do it without even being in sight of the buildings.

She hoped she never got to the point of being willing to kill that many people just to get one target. Bad enough that she was thinking of Sylvia as a target.

Zach had gotten her the building schematics. He’d also confirmed that Sylvia would be there another three weeks. She had invested in the place and tended to stay for a few weeks every four or five months.

Layla walked from town to the spa grounds. Anything else would leave too much record. Also, if she was lucky, she might find some new fallen walnuts to dye her hair and skin. The climate was right for walnuts, and it was fall. There were other things she could use, but walnut husks would be an easy brownness, one she could control much better than anything from a drug store’s shelves.

She found walnuts, rough, green balls that would stain anything at all once the skins broke. She coaxed what she needed out without needing to abrade or smash anything. She wasn’t anywhere near a place where kids might draw on the pavement by pressing the spheres hard against it and scraping, so she didn’t indulge in that, much as she wanted to.

Much cheaper than chalk but only one color and apt to stain fingers and clothing.

Because she was alone, she whispered to the brownness inside the husks, telling it what she needed. She didn’t have a way to check her appearance, but she trusted the walnuts to understand how important this was. Her eye color was the hard part because she had to take the plant inside herself and then let it be visible.

It hurt a little, but she thought that was more because she’d never done it before than because it was harming her.

The walnuts would only help so far, but most people weren’t going to look at her closely enough to notice. She’d just have to be really careful about the cameras.

She left her coat just beyond the staff parking lot, giving it to a tree to hold. She put aside some other, less tangible things there, too-- her doubts, her ethics, her compassion, everything that might make her hesitate. She could trust the tree to keep those things, too.

The grass and the bushes knew where the security system picked up. They could hear it. They didn’t notice it so much any more, but it annoyed them in the way that an apartment shaking when the train went by would annoy humans.

Magenta’s tinkering got Layla through the card swipe part of the security system. A little sedating pollen got her past the human guards. She thought that should be out of their systems well before anyone else noticed. They weren’t asleep, not exactly, just detached enough to be letting people in if they looked close enough to right. They wouldn’t remember who’d come through this way.

Layla helped clean four rooms before she got to where she needed to be. Wearing the blue gloves for scrubbing covered part of the scarring on her arms, so cleaning toilets was a help. She had no idea why a place with this sort of clientele would have such lax security, but it made passing a little easier.

Zach had been right about where the furnace and air conditioner were and about all of the plumbing. He wasn’t nearly so accurate on the wiring, but Layla didn’t actually need that. She put traces of her poison into a drain that had recently needed professional work. Then she threaded it through to the sewer, making it grow and grow and grow. Perforating things at just the right point to get it into the air of Sylvia’s room was harder, much harder.

She was really glad that she was dealing with PVC. Copper would have been harder, and she wasn’t sure anything she’d come up with could cope with lead. She’d had to design something for this specifically as it was, and the organism fought her. There was so much other food, and it only wanted to grow. If she let it, it would have eaten every scrap of PVC in the building and gone looking for more. 

She’d have to work on copper and lead. Realistically, this wasn’t going to be her only murder. Just the first. Just the most necessary.

Making something anaerobic enough to survive the pipes and something aerobic that was clearly the same thing had been a challenge. Two separate poisons would have been easy. Still she’d had time to work.

Warren had been very reluctant to let her go to the surface. Somewhere in his fragmented brain, he understood that she actually could kill everyone accompanying her. She hadn’t, but she could have.

She had promised him that she would return ‘when the business was done.’ If he realized that latitude that gave her, he hadn’t shown any sign of it.

The poison spores were much more cooperative than the PVC eaters. She never had and never would let them near Warren-- probably not Barron Battle either-- because she’d raised them on whispers of Warren’s DNA. There were three people in the world certain to die of the spores. Other people would get very sick. Some might die. She hoped not, but the idea of macroscopic death was difficult for the spores to understand, so she hadn’t been able to explain the idea of specific, limited killing.

She’d just set a time dependent ending for the spores. When they reproduced and died, they’d be less toxic. Succeeding generations would become even less so. She’d considered just not letting them reproduce past a certain point, but that would have made them very obviously engineered. As it was, the fact that the ones inside Sylvia Peace would simply sit there and poison her without dying or reproducing was potentially evidence enough of intention.

But possibly no one would notice.

And, if they did, Layla was interested in botany. There wasn’t anyone on Sky High who knew a damned thing about mold, and there weren’t any records of anyone else being able to manipulate it. Ever.

She helped clean more rooms while her poison spread. By the end of her shift, Sylvia Peace had inhaled more than enough to kill her. Layla walked out at the shift change and retrieved her coat. She walked to a different town, bought some used clothes, then changed her appearance by letting her eyes go back to green and fading the stain on her skin.

She changed buses and direction several times after that. Each time, she put on a different t-shirt, changed her hairstyle and let the walnut erode a little further.

Layla called the cabin at three in the morning, from a cell phone she’d ‘borrowed’ at a bus station, and got the machine. She left a message of love for Will to pass on to her parents. She couldn’t bring herself to leave a message for Will.

She deleted the call history from the phone, wiped the fingerprints, then turned it in at the ticket window as something she’d found on the floor. That might not cover her completely, but it would make things a little harder. The phone and the woman it belonged to were going north, so Layla went west.

Warren’s mother died before Layla got back to Sky High.


	6. Warren: And I Do Not Refuse It

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from Robert Bly's "My Father's Neck."

**November 2007**

Warren left the matter of Layla’s disappearance for after the funeral. At that point, he took her to his office and asked, “How?” Then he shook his head because things known were harder for him to lie about. His father might still ask. His mother wouldn’t, not ever again. He frowned as he considered options then said, “Not how. Just why. You went looking for… Not your parents.” His eyes narrowed. “Zach’s mother’s been sick.” He hoped she’d take that cover. It being true would help a bit.

Her eyes widened slightly as if he’d caught her doing something she wasn’t supposed to. Which helping Zach’s family would be. It just wasn’t anything like as bad as either of them admitting that she’d murdered Warren’s mother. None of Warren’s sidekicks were supposed to track family groundside. He’d known that they would try and had been content to leave it at that as long as they made an effort to be discreet.

It had been a gamble. They might have tried to arrange for a rescue.

But, if they wanted blood, Layla could certainly have managed it, and Warren wasn’t ignorant enough-- not any more-- not to understand what he was trusting Zach with.

Layla smiled. “I sent them money. You won’t be able to trace it.”

He wouldn’t even try. She probably had sent money because none of them were likely to forget supporting details, especially not easy ones. Warren tracing the payment wouldn’t tell him anything but where Layla had been right at the moment she sent it. She certainly wouldn’t have been anywhere near the Magnolia Spa where his mother had been staying.

He considered that for a moment. The other three had all known. They’d all thought, too, that Layla going might cost them. Ethan had set his shoulders and inhaled slowly through his teeth when Warren confronted them. Zach had flinched and tried to make himself smaller. Magenta had bared her teeth and dared Warren to question it when she said, “She’ll be back. Later.”

He hadn’t let himself make any guesses about what Layla might be doing. On some level, he’d known it couldn’t be anything else, but he’d absolutely needed not to know. If he’d known, he’d have had to protect his mother. He’d have died of that because Warren alive was never going to be worth more than his mother dead, especially not with Layla’s role in the whole thing potentially out in the open.

Not having that obligation to his mother any more made him feel as if he might fly to pieces, as if that pressure had been glue holding him together and keeping him sane.

He realized that Layla was studying him appraisingly. 

After a moment, she nodded. “Thank you for not punishing the others.”

For the first time, Warren admitted that she’d come back without knowing what had happened on Sky High, without knowing what Warren might do to her. Warren was pretty sure he couldn’t have come back. He wouldn’t have even if he’d known he’d be physically safe. Being out from under would be too great a relief.

He wondered what he’d have done if she hadn’t come back. He’d have wanted her to return, wanted her to choose him, but he’d have owed her a debt for his mother’s death. He wasn’t sure he could have repaid that by hunting her.

There was also the small matter of him being more sure now that she could destroy him any time she wanted to. 

His mother hadn’t been strangled or fed poison. She hadn’t been wrapped in leaves until she couldn’t breathe or stabbed by giant thorns. She’d died from very tiny things in her lungs that poisoned her blood. Warren had read the autopsy report. He’d understood enough to know that what killed her was very, very definitely _not_ a plant. His mother’s death had been an unfortunate maintenance failure because nobody could manipulate mold. Even if someone could, they couldn’t have gotten it to where it had been.

Manifestly, Layla could and had. She hadn’t ever let him know everything she could do, so he doubted she had now. 

Warren understood why his mother was dead. 

The part he didn’t understand, not entirely, was why he was still alive. It wasn’t because Layla _couldn’t_ kill him. That part was now beyond obvious. He was pretty sure that Layla wouldn’t tell him if he asked, so he simply flicked his fingers at her. “You should have asked.” He let his eyes tell her that she’d been right not to.

“Next time, I will.” She smiled in a way that might have been sincere but also might not have been. 

Warren had had to accept a long time before that he really couldn’t read Layla. He could predict her sometimes, but he couldn’t read her. He smiled and nodded. Then he waved a hand to indicate that she could leave if she wanted to.

She looked relieved which surprised him. She nodded at him in return then left him alone. 

Her leaving was something of a relief. He wondered why he didn’t hate Layla for the threat she posed, why he hadn’t tried to kill her. Well, he knew why. Right now, Layla had a clear line between what she would and wouldn’t do. When that line broke, it wouldn’t move; it would vanish entirely. It might come back later, but unless-- until-- it did, there wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do if she thought it needed doing.

He hadn’t understood that when she’d explained it to him while they were sitting in his room and drinking tea. He’d only gotten it after, months after.

If Warren hurt Layla or one of her friends, that line would evaporate. Ethan, Zach, and Magenta were afraid of what Warren might do, but the real reason they let Warren give orders was guessing what might happen to Layla’s psyche if the balance broke. All three of them knew she could take Warren; all three of them knew that she’d chosen not to. Yet.

Layla saying ‘next time, I will’ might be a sort of a promise that she wouldn’t go after Warren’s father. Warren hoped that was what she meant because he knew he couldn’t stop her if she wanted someone dead. If he hadn’t had his mother’s commands in his head, he was almost certain he wouldn’t even consider trying, not even for his father. 

Warren wasn’t remotely that stupid or that fond of his father.

If-- when-- Layla wanted to rule the world, Warren would bow and ask her what she wanted him to burn. Until then, he’d carry on pretending that she couldn’t kill him in under ten seconds.

He kind of didn’t understand why she hadn’t already started working on taking over. She’d be better at it than his father was because she’d actually bother with rebuilding and administration. Layla cared about that shit, and she actually cared about the people groundside. People generally rather than just specific people.

Ethan was the only other one of the five of them who cared about people generally.

Maybe she was biding her time. In another fifteen or so years, they’d have twenty four kids with Hero track powers who adored Layla and would bring her the moon if she asked, and Zach and Ethan would have had a long time to figure out how things ought to work.

Warren supposed that Layla would tell him what she wanted eventually. That or he’d finally figure it out. Worrying about Magenta putting a knife in him tomorrow was more urgent than worrying about what Layla meant to do next year or next decade.

Warren had been a little worried that his father would be heartbroken by his mother’s death. Warren still didn’t understand what had kept them together if it hadn’t been his mother compelling Barron Battle to love her. The part of Warren that had had to love his mother was still devastated by her death. He just had that bit well cordoned off from anything real.

But Barron Battle had merely looked severe at the funeral. He hadn’t even burned down the spa or killed the plumbers. He also hadn’t asked why Warren hadn’t taken those steps. If he had asked, Warren would have suggested doing it together, but Warren had been just as happy to go home after without any side trips.

Warren wasn’t afraid of his father now that he actually knew him. That had ended some time during the first year after Homecoming. Barron Battle had no interest in interfering in affairs on Sky High. He liked Warren in a sort of genial and open way but was also a bit bewildered by having a child who was seventeen. He hadn’t seen Warren grow up, not in a way that made his seventeen year old son connect logically to the five year old he remembered more viscerally.

All his father seemed to want was for Warren to be safe and happy. An occasional visit in either direction and a bit of shared destruction was all that he demanded. Warren could burn down some buildings and kill a few people if that was how his father wanted to bond. It was a little boring, but he supposed it was better than having to learn golf or racquetball or to pretend to like jazz.

And the occasional public father-son bonding meant that nobody ever tried to fuck with Warren. They recognized him. They knew what he could do and that he had done it for much less than some asshole being rude. 

If he had any alternative, he wouldn’t stand between his father and Layla, but he would stand with his father against anyone else. He’d give his father the son he wanted.


	7. Zach 3: Tight Around the Heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from Hoa Nguyen's "Ficus Carica Sonnet."
> 
> This chapter fills in some time between Zach's second chapter and Layla's second chapter and expands on what comes after Warren's mother's death.

**May 2005 through the end of 2007**

When Warren was allowed to decide who replaced the reassigned personnel, Zach was pleased. When Barron Battle took Warren’s mother to Paris the weekend of Mother’s Day, Zach decided that Barron Battle actually wanted to protect Warren. A day late and a dollar short, but… better than Warren or any of the rest of them had expected.

Somehow, after that, every time Warren’s mother might have visited, some exciting alternative came up-- mayhem, jewelry, parties. People started knowing who Sylvia Peace was and that Barron Battle both loved her and respected her power.

She still called Warren once every few weeks, but according to Magenta, it was all Sylvia delivering a monologue about the wonderful things she’d been doing. Warren only had to look interested and nod at intervals.

Layla said that Sylvia was trying to let everyone forget that she had a son Warren’s age. “She thinks she can’t be glamorous if she’s over thirty. It’s as common for some supers as it is in Hollywood.” Layla frowned as she considered it. “I suppose it’s too much work to make each new person forget. Probably, her power doesn’t work except face to face. If we’re lucky, it’s one on one rather than her being able to affect a crowd.”

Neither Warren nor his father ever attached the name ‘Peace’ to Warren. They hadn’t since Homecoming. Warren hadn’t started using ‘Battle,’ but they all knew he probably would. He wasn’t going to wait until his mother suggested it. He’d change his name because he wanted to.

Warren let Zach go to the surface first. Zach had angled for it by complaining about their suppliers passing him subpar produce and meat and by mentioning that it was easier to judge the quality of clothing if he could actually look at the seams. “No point in buying onesies that’ll fall to pieces after the first wash.”

Warren gave Zach a flat expression.

Zach met his eyes and shrugged. “Where could I go where you wouldn’t find me? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like what happened after.”

“I’d have to,” Warren said.

“I know,” Zach replied. He sighed. “You have to let one of us go down there eventually.”

Warren’s expression said that no, he didn’t actually think he had to. “Magenta has.”

“With you.” They all knew that was different. “It’s been a year, Warren. I wouldn’t even know where to look to find my family. I don’t even know if they’re all alive.” 

Warren said, “It wouldn’t be safe. You going down or you bringing them here.”

Zach swallowed hard because he hadn’t known that that last might be a thing even on the table. He turned halfway away from Warren. “They wouldn’t want to. Even if it was safe. Even if I could find them.”

He could find them. Magenta knew how to reach them and Ethan’s parents. Warren’s prisoners had decided that it was safer for everything to go through Magenta because she didn’t have the same attachment to anyone groundside. She wouldn’t tell them too much or make them think that Zach and Ethan were coming back.

Zach was pretty sure he’d make his parents any promises that made them feel better.

She didn’t try to communicate with Layla’s parents, not directly. Layla’s mother was too visible in opposing Barron Battle wherever he went. There was too much temptation to give Layla’s parents real information.

Also, Layla’s parents were likely to be the hard line between what Warren could pretend he didn’t notice and what he had to punish them for.

Sending money was okay. Sending the names of forgers and doctors who could probably still be trusted was okay, too, but probably not all that useful. The superhero community had its own secrets in that direction. 

The closest Magenta got to real information was broad warnings about avoiding certain regions during certain months. Saying “Stay out of the Great Lakes region during the summer” was general enough not to be actionable intelligence but specific enough that the half dozen people they cared about could vacate.

And those warnings weren’t about Barron Battle. He mostly didn’t make long term plans. By the time they knew where he was going, he was, at most, hours away.

Neither of Zach’s sisters had powers yet. His parents had powers but had chosen to hang up their capes before Zach was born. His mother could sense poisons and, sometimes, neutralize them. His father could channel energy of various types through his body; he just needed something or someone else to provide the power, so his ability to fight had always been limited by his physical reach and opportunity to prepare in advance.

Ethan’s parents were divorced. Ethan and his older sister had lived with his mother and seen his father most weekends. None of the other three had powers, but two of Ethan’s grandparents did, one on each side. Zach hadn’t been surprised at all to hear that both had elasticity related powers.

Magenta didn’t know where any of her blood relatives were. She hadn’t known even before Homecoming and wasn’t much interested now. She sent money to some of the foster parents she’d had, though. She said that, given what was going on, they were going to have trouble feeding everybody they’d probably taken in. “I kind of doubt the state’s still paying much of anything or will for much longer.”

Magenta was never going to admit that part of her wanted to bring all of those people and the kids they cared for to Sky High. There actually were things worse than Warren and his parents and his thugs, but if she asked and Warren said yes, she’d never be able to stop, and the island was only so big.

Magenta and Layla had that in common. Both of them had things they couldn’t start without wrecking themselves trying to see it all through to an end that wouldn’t arrive. Different things but still the same problem. Magenta’d learned not to let herself start. Layla just pretended that it wasn’t up to her.

They were all so very screwed if Warren ever figured that part out.

Zach finally got Warren to bend on letting him go downside by pointing out that, while Warren could give his employees a holiday bonus in their paychecks, Zach was going to have to find something else. Zach thought it was a much weaker argument than the one about talking to their wholesalers, but Warren took it seriously.

Warren took Zach downside, to one of the suburbs of Chicago. They ended up in some sort of high end department store, and Warren wandered off, leaving Zach looking at sports equipment and realizing that gifts to employees were a really fucking difficult thing if he wanted to find something everyone would like.

But he was on the ground. He wasn’t alone. Warren had left a minder. Zach might have been able to escape him, but Zach wasn’t planning to try.

Warren’s mother wasn’t coming to Sky High. The only way to kill her was going to be getting Layla to her. Zach was betting that Layla leaving Sky High was going to be a more difficult sell than Zach leaving had been.

In the end, Warren let Layla go to Ghana and Brazil and Nepal before he let her go anywhere near the US. Magenta sold those trips to Warren as opportunities for Layla to stock her greenhouse with things that she couldn’t order from Burpee, and Layla’d certainly done that. Her space was now half things Zach cooked with and half things he’d never heard of.

None of it looked like it would tear a person limb from limb, but Warren very seldom visited Layla’s greenhouses which Zach took as meaning that he knew enough to be wary. Staying away from the greenhouses wouldn’t help, of course. Warren may or may not have realized that.

Zach felt safer in the greenhouses.

Layla growing vegetables and kids happily underfoot everywhere tended to convince the spies that didn’t work for Warren’s parents that Sky High was completely harmless. Not undefended, of course, but also not gearing up for aerial assaults. 

Ethan and Magenta had made sure that Zach hired a few people with defensive design experience. Zach probably wouldn’t have thought to, not soon enough, anyway. He’d been more worried about toddlers falling off the edge of the island than he had been about kidnappers, but they had four attempted raids during the second year once the fact that they had those kids became more widely known.

They only had two during the third year because the kids Gwen had taken were much softer targets. There were more of them, and they tended to be in places that didn’t require either flying or being fireproof.

Zach tried hard not to think about those kids. Magenta made some efforts to pass on information about them to Zach’s parents with the idea that they’d pass word along to people who might do something. Probably some of the kids who disappeared ended up fostered somewhere, one here, two there. They were a lot harder to find that way because toddlers and preschoolers were common. Those who’d have powers later on didn’t come with identifying marks.

Zach hoped that all of the ones who’d become sidekicks got fostered. He didn’t think the people who saw the kids as an investment would want the sidekicks, and that-- That was another thing he tried not to think about.

Ethan and Magenta screened new arrivals on the island for probable spies. Magenta told Zach that he shouldn’t try to screen that way when hiring because spies who had had an easy time getting to Sky High were more likely to be careless once there. 

What happened to the spies after they arrived depended on why they seemed to be there. The ones wanting to assassinate Warren or kidnap the kids or take over Sky High generally just disappeared. Those who worked for Layla’s parents’ cabal or some similar group got a tour and a ride back to the ground.

That they all also got a tour of Layla’s vegetable garden and lost track of time in there was-- Well, vegetable gardens really weren’t all that thrilling, and Layla kept the heat and humidity high. Layla was so very obviously harmless that, as far as Zach knew, most people hadn’t realized she was responsible.

There was one spy who came through every three or four months. He used a different name each time, but by the fourth visit, he wasn’t even bothering to hide his identity. He arrived, requested the tour, and went away again. They called him the Nuclear Inspector because they weren’t sure what his real name was but knew he worked for the US government.

As far as they could tell, he hadn’t told anyone that he’d lost a lot of time in the greenhouses. He just looked a little resigned each time that part of the tour came up. Layla said that he thought she was using normal botanically derived drugs rather than ones that required powers to refine. She also said that he respected her more for that because he thought powers were cheating.

“I almost feel bad about that,” she said more than once, “but it’s more convenient if he approves of us.”

After Warren’s mother died, he told Zach that, if he wanted his family on Sky High, Warren would be happy to make space available. Zach thanked him with sincerity but didn’t end up telling his parents. Even with the fighting, there were better, safer places for the medical care his mother needed. Zach didn’t doubt that Warren was willing to spend the money necessary to hire the specialists and buy the equipment, but Zach would much rather put that money toward paying for his mother’s care in a place that was already good at it.

Given the offer, though, Zach took a chance and asked if he could write to his mother. He was only a little surprised when Warren agreed. He was considerably more surprised when Warren told Layla that she could write to her father.

The idea that it was okay for Layla to write to her father because he wasn’t the same sort of enemy that Layla’s mother was… Well, if Zach hadn’t known Warren for two years, he’d have thought Warren was joking. Now, Zach knew that Warren was simply slicing off inconvenient bits of truth so that he could do what he wanted.

Warren wanted to give Layla something to say thank you without saying it. A parent returned for a parent removed.


	8. Magenta: Forever with a Thorn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from Sara Teasdale's "Crowned."

**November 2008**

Magenta had saved Warren’s life at least four times in the last three years. She’d also come close to killing him so many times that she didn’t bother keeping track any more. She wasn’t sure if he realized the risk he took every time he let her stand beside him.

No, he had to know. He just did it anyway because he was beyond nuts.

And, even now, years after the five of them started sharing quarters, it was a risk for him every time he fell asleep at night. It always would be. Neither of them ever acknowledged it, but Zach was right the one night, about a week in, when he looked from Magenta to Warren and back and said, “Good night, Wesley. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.”

It was only funny because it was true.

Part of Magenta had hated the change of quarters because the walls were no longer solidly concrete, no longer limiting angles of approach and spying, and because Warren could turn up anywhere. The locker room had been a prison, but they’d gotten used to it. Being in there felt safer, more certainly private. She was pretty sure that the other three saw that part as a loss, too, but they were more hurt by the realization that it meant that Warren was entirely sure he owned them.

Zach had an office. Layla had the greenhouses. Ethan took the library. Mostly, when they wanted privacy, they went to the greenhouses. If Layla was there, it was beyond safe. It just didn’t feel as secure as a foot of concrete all around.

Magenta had the ducts but often followed Warren around in her human form and then visited one or another friend when Warren was busy with the third. She was pretty sure that no one, outside of the five of them, realized that she was pretty constantly deciding whether or not to kill Warren.

Warren had to know. He wasn’t stupid.

Part of Magenta had been relieved by the change to the five of them living together. The quarters they shared with Warren had windows, and nothing locked from the outside. All four of them were allowed to come and go as they pleased. Somebody else changed the sheets and made sure nothing smelled bad.

And, whenever someone came after Warren in the night, Magenta was there to make sure that he didn’t die. Her imagination had provided some very ugly ideas about what Barron Battle was likely to do to them if someone murdered Warren, and actually meeting Warren’s father hadn’t made her doubt those ideas.

Keeping them all locked in when they weren’t supervised had made sense once but had gradually become an inconvenience for Warren. Magenta was pretty sure that he’d kept it going as long as he had more because it made a point than because he thought it was actually necessary. He’d owned them for months.

He said it was because the space had been under construction, had been low priority, but he’d been making a point. He’d also been reassessing them because they’d rubbed his face in the fact that they weren’t fucking pets.

If nothing else, he now had a much clearer idea of what Layla could do than he’d had even a month after they tried to escape. Magenta supposed that Warren being foolhardy enough to start fucking Layla explained why he didn’t regard standing next to Magenta as a risk. Magenta might kill him. Layla could certainly do worse than that.

Layla said that Warren knew that part. She said he realized that even Zach would kill him for the rest of them.

Ethan had said something about keeping Warren inside the tent and pissing out that Magenta thought only someone with a dick would think was sensible. He said, more than once, that Warren wanted all four of them, that Warren wanted to be on the inside of something safe and real. Ethan said that Warren would lie to himself as much as he had to to get it.

Magenta understood wanting that, but she resented the fact that Warren could get it-- or thought he could-- by kidnapping, threats, and torture. She understood why her friends-- her family now-- were giving it to him. She understood why she wasn’t-- quite-- too.

Zach had said something considerably more logical. He had said that having Warren love them was power over him. “We’re here. Every day. He doesn’t just want us to love him. He wants to be able to love us. To have it be safe to love us. Loving us is something he gets to choose.” Zach had also pointed out that Warren loving them didn’t just protect them from Warren.

Which apparently was what Ethan had meant with the whole thing about tents and pissing. Magenta thought he could have just said that.

Layla had simply shrugged and said that it wasn’t as if they were going to get a better offer. She’d held Magenta extra close that last night in the locker room, though, and Magenta wasn’t unobservant enough not to have noticed.

She’d also noticed the change in Warren over the years. He had hope now, had had it even before his mother died so unexpectedly, and when he killed, he knew that it was real. Unless it was one of them or one of the kids-- which seemed pretty damned unlikely-- he wasn’t ever going to care, but he’d know.

That knowing was new. Ethan called it a good sign.

Magenta thought it might mean that Warren was going to do something about her. He had something real with the other three, but he only connected with her through them and through the charade they put on occasionally in public.

And they didn’t do the latter so much any more, not since word got around that she’d gut anyone who attacked Barron Battle’s son. It wasn’t professional for a bodyguard to act like a lover in public, and there wasn’t anything Magenta could get that way that Warren wouldn’t give her anyway.

Ethan was right, though-- Warren wanted the complete set.

Warren just hadn’t figured out that there was no secret ingredient. There weren’t words he could speak or things he could do that would change the past, and she knew him well enough, now, to know what she could trust him for, so promises would only matter if he really would keep them.

He’d surprised her, though, by not hurting them when Layla disappeared. Magenta had said, “She’ll be back,” and Warren had nodded. He’d been on edge the whole time Layla had been gone, and he and Magenta had left Sky High twice in search of trouble, but he hadn’t set anyone searching for Layla or even admitted that she wasn’t on an authorized mission.

Magenta hadn’t thought he could give them that sort of trust, not when he never let them all leave Sky High at once, not when they had to ask permission to go, not when he so often said no to them leaving at all.

If he hadn’t been such an asshole about it, they probably could have taken care of his mother at least six months sooner, but Warren had been a paranoid shit about the idea of Layla going downside anywhere in the continental U.S. 

He never once mentioned Will or Layla’s parents. He didn’t have to.

They’d waited, figuring that the trade-off of time for Layla being the assassin was worthwhile. She was the only one of them who could be sure without leaving solid evidence of murder and, probably, solid evidence who had committed it. They’d also hoped that Layla could limit the collateral damage, and she mostly had.

Zach finding a way to blow up whatever building Warren’s mother was in was their second best choice which said a lot about the risks involved in Ethan or Magenta trying it. At least, with a bomb, anybody could have done it. Sylvia Peace wasn’t nearly as low profile as she had been. She had enemies.

Ethan and Magenta risked leaving DNA evidence because they’d both have to get in close. If anyone could prove that they’d been there, Warren would torture them again. He’d have to or lose face, and he wouldn’t hesitate.

Whatever Warren would do would be nothing next to what Barron Battle would do to them if Warren didn’t, so there was that.

Magenta suspected that Layla and Zach forgot sometimes how really fucking dangerous Warren was. Forgetting was one way to stay sane, and Warren hadn’t hurt them-- not any of them, not physically-- since he stopped torturing Ethan for their escape attempt. He sometimes played bondage games with Layla that had freaked Magenta the fuck out until she realized that he only did that with Layla.

Layla could stop him any time she wanted to, and Warren knew it. Layla thought it was fun.

None of the rest of them would have, and Warren never gave any sign of wanting to go that way with anyone else.

Zach and Layla both thought that made Warren less dangerous. Ethan and Magenta knew differently, but Ethan still hoped for less-dangerous-for-us.

Magenta had never thought she’d be the last one still seeing Warren for what he was.

Which made the conversation she was about to have really fucking ironic. She was the one who couldn’t offer Warren compassion or forgiveness. Understanding, yes, but nothing softer.

She wasn’t sure why the now three year old victims of Homecoming remembering fragments of who they used to be had surprised Warren, and it had to have, or he wouldn’t have let himself react this strongly. Gwen had pretty clearly remembered a few small but emotionally important things. Things like hating Sky High and resenting being labeled a sidekick when she obviously wasn’t.

Magenta spared a thought to wonder if Sue Tenney had had family alive when she regressed herself and if they’d ever known what had happened to her. Then she shrugged. That didn’t have any bearing on this unless Magenta wanted to try to convince Warren to tell them who the kids they had had once been. He’d ‘accidentally’ switched all of the names, and the only one he’d definitely identified to them was Will’s mother.

If Warren didn’t have a coded list somewhere-- probably more than one-- Magenta would eat the most poisonous plant she could find in Layla’s greenhouses. Not that that was much risk. Layla could stop the poison working. She’d make sure Magenta was sick as hell so that she learned better, but Layla would only let that go so far.

It hadn’t been Warren’s reason for switching the names, but Magenta thought the kids were better off without the adults around them making assumptions about who they’d be. Stitches’ assumptions had bound Gwen to Royal Pain. She could have done anything, but she’d gone with Homecoming and the Pacifier, locking herself into being the Sue Tenney that Stitches had always wanted.

Gwen probably didn’t even know it. She didn’t remember being anything else.

Magenta smelled the charring a long time before she got to the rooms where Warren had holed up, so she wasn’t particularly surprised to find that everything that could burn had. She wondered how he’d managed not to suffocate. She was pretty sure that he still needed to breathe even when he was burning shit that would react without oxygen, and the ventilation wasn’t that good.

She also thought that it said something that Warren had locked himself inside the boys’ locker room.

The burnt out lockers and benches made the mirroring of their longtime prison seem doubly surreal. Warren had torched all of Coach Boomer’s things, too.

Magenta wondered why Warren had left the space untouched since Homecoming. She was pretty sure there was-- had been-- a reason, and it might matter. Maybe Coach Boomer had been nice to Warren once.

She had no interest in getting torched, so she backed up from the opening a bit before she said, “Warren, I’m coming in.”

She hadn’t been wrong. Flame jetted past the vent opening. She’d judged it pretty well and didn’t even get singed. “Asshole,” she said flatly. She gave him three seconds before she moved to the opening and jumped, shifting human as she fell to the floor.

She swallowed a sigh of relief as she landed. She’d been afraid he’d attack her on the way down.

“Go away.”

“No.” She said it firmly. “You’re making Ethan worry. The only reason Layla hasn’t pulled down the walls is that she knows you’ve got water.” Assuming he hadn’t melted all the taps. “You _do_ still have water, right?” He’d have had to work pretty damned hard to get every tap in the shower room.

He made a noise that didn’t actually answer the question and that Magenta interpreted as ‘fuck off.’

“Yeah, no.” She sat on the scorched floor under the vent and regarded him between slagged lockers. “I get to poke you with a stick because I’m the one who doesn’t give a fuck if you’re happy.” Which was a lie. Magenta cared a hell of a lot about Warren being happy.

It just wasn’t because she loved him. She loved Ethan and Layla and Zach. What she felt for Warren bore no resemblance to what she felt for them. She supposed some people might still call it love. 

Warren might, possibly, love her, but Warren’s love was a shitty, stalkery thing that she didn’t particularly want. There just wasn’t any way to get free of it that wasn’t worse than living with it.

She looked around the room. “Bet you didn’t toss the lockers before you burned everything.” She wrinkled her nose. “Not that years old granola bars and fruit roll-ups count as food. Layla thought they didn’t even when they were fresh.”

Not that Layla hadn’t eaten them while they waited to see if Warren was ever going to open the door again.

Warren didn’t say anything, but he was at least looking at her now.

“Did you find Boomer’s stash or was the booze catching fire a surprise?” She was guessing, but the Coach had been the sort who’d have had a bottle or three in a locked drawer. Warren had put out enough heat to crack and melt the glass between the Coach’s office and the space where the lockers had been. Whiskey or Scotch or whatever the hell the Coach had in there would have found a way to ignite.

Warren cleared his throat and looked away. “Drank it,” he said after several seconds.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Surprised you didn’t kill yourself with it.”

“I--” Warren shook his head.

Oh, so he’d been trying. Maybe the rooms had burned because Warren’s body was trying to get rid of the alcohol. He’d burned for hours after they’d gotten Layla’s potion into him.

But that hadn’t resulted in anything near this level of destruction.

She let her anger show as she pointed a finger at him. “What the hell do you think would happen to those kids if you had? Layla? Zach? Ethan?” She gave him a look meant to convey that she could run through the names of all twenty four toddlers if she had to in order to shame him properly. She couldn’t, not without forgetting some of them and repeating others, but she thought he’d believe she might. After all, she was pretty damned sure that he could recite the list without stumbling.

He hunched his shoulders. “It’s a really shitty way to live. The scraps of maybe memories thing, I mean.”

“Right.” She leaned back against the wall and tried not to think about the soot working its way into her clothing. “So, obviously, the solution to something really shitty is this.” She waved a hand to indicate the entire room. “Or, rather, this combined with leaving the victims of the something really shitty to deal with the fallout.”

He flinched.

She wrinkled her nose. “I’m kind of glad that all I smell is smoke. You’ve been in here three days. You must reek.” She looked around. “I’d tell you to wash, but there’s no soap or towels or clean clothes left.”

He stared at her.

“What? I made my point. You understood it. What you do with it is up to you. If I could make you do things, a lot of shit would be different.”

“You still hate me, don’t you?”

She shrugged. “That’s more energy than I bother with. I’m just not going to forget the places you could have made different choices.” She held his eyes until he looked away. They both knew what she was talking about and that it wasn’t the things the other three probably thought it was. She looked at her fingernails. “We’re here. It’s now. We’ve got what we’ve got.” She softened her voice a little and added, “The kids have what they have, what we’ve given them. We can give them more, or we-- _you_ \-- can abandon them.”

Warren didn’t answer for almost five minutes, so Magenta let herself consider options.

The odds of Magenta and her friends, even with the help of the hired caretakers, getting the kids to the ground and hidden well enough that Barron Battle wouldn’t find them were minute, but they’d certainly try if Warren killed himself or looked like he might hurt the kids. 

If Warren was still suicidal, there was a chance he’d go after the kids so that they’d die with him and be spared whatever-the-hell he thought the problem was. Magenta weighed that risk then shrugged mentally. They’d have to watch for that. One more thing on the list of Shit We Can’t Trust Warren With. The rest of them would do what they had to do.

Warren threatening the kids while Layla was standing there to stop him would be suicide, too, just a different sort. It wasn’t as if Warren didn’t know what Layla could do or didn’t know that she’d choose the kids over him every damned time. He’d counted on her making that choice back at the start, and he hadn’t misjudged that part of her personality, just her level of power.

Magenta was pretty sure that the Layla who could kill could also enslave. She’d be very surprised if Layla hadn’t made plans in that direction, just in case. Layla simply hadn’t done it because, if she did, she wouldn’t be human any more, because the person she preferred to be couldn’t keep that going for months turning into decades.

Magenta thought that killing Barron Battle and then killing Warren would be a much cleaner and simpler solution. Quite a few other people would likely have to die, too, but they could do it. Probably. 

They just couldn’t stay on Sky High after, so the kids would end up learning about hunger and cold and fear. Magenta thought that the kids would probably be okay, but she wasn’t sure there actually was a price Layla wouldn’t pay to buy the safety of Sky High for the rest of them.

If Warren didn’t know all of that, then he wasn’t nearly as good at people as they’d all thought he was.

So maybe fear of what Layla could do to his mind was why he’d locked himself into the boys’ locker room before he exploded.

“I’m not sure I can go back out there.” Warren’s tone told Magenta that it wasn’t a matter of physical can or can’t, so she didn’t bother pointing out that he wouldn’t have to walk, that Zach had people who were good at carrying shit and who wouldn’t blink at carrying Warren.

She shrugged. “Pick an enemy. Any enemy. Someone pissed you off.” She hoped he’d accept that as a figleaf. “Hell,” she said after a moment, “you can say it was my mother or father. Nobody outside the five of us realizes that I wouldn’t recognize them if I passed them on the street.”

Barron Battle probably knew, but he wasn’t going to give a fuck that it was a lie. He’d probably visit, and his pet airbender would ask Zach a few questions. Zach would spill because it wasn’t something that would hurt him or the other three of them.

Same as it ever was.

Zach probably guessed that Ethan was spying on them from the ducts and had since Zach told Ethan, Layla, and Magenta about the questions the woman asked. Magenta was almost certain, however, that Windy Endicott didn’t realize Ethan was there. He didn’t breathe in his other form, and he tended toward flatness, so he wouldn’t disrupt the flow of air much at all.

Even if Magenta hadn’t needed to be visible when Barron Battle visited, Ethan would have been the better choice for spy in the ducts.

“I think,” she said, “that most people out there are either loyal enough not to question or terrified enough of you to be glad you didn’t barbecue them.” Most likely both. “People don’t forget that you’re a supervillain, and every damned one of them knows that your father takes things out on the people around him.”

“Be careful.” Warren’s expression sharpened.

Magenta shrugged. “Barron Battle knows who and what he is. He’s never pretended to be anything else. He just doesn’t expect you to be him.” She sighed and shifted her weight. “I have not missed sitting on these floors. Seriously, Warren, your dad’s an asshole, but he owns it, and he fucking loves you. If he didn’t, he’d have taken Sky High and the kids as soon as you proved you could handle them.”

Warren looked like he was considering that but didn’t quite believe it.

Magenta raised her eyebrows. “You really think he promised our families were safe because he likes _us_?”

Magenta hadn’t cried that night, but the other three had. None of them had thought it was anything but a bribe, but it was something that they wanted desperately and would have done much less pleasant, less safe, and less moral things than fucking Warren to get.

She saw that point hit home, so she pressed. “If you really need to kill yourself, make it obviously not our fault. I’m pretty sure your dad would send the four of us and the kids off to somewhere safe with a ton of money. If it wasn’t our fault. Very, very obviously not, no subtlety involved at all. ‘When you choose an action, you accept its consequences.’ You told me that, so make damned sure you’re wanting that consequence.”

“Is that why you don’t kill me?”

She bared her teeth at him. Then she smiled. “It’s habit now. Can’t say that I don’t still cherish the memory of how scared you looked with Ethan holding that knife to your throat, but I probably won’t kill you now.” She considered for a moment. “Though Ethan and Layla probably have plans for if I ever do. Or even if I just corner you in a detention room with a knife. You’re not that much stronger than me any more, and maybe you screaming some would be enough.”

He inhaled unsteadily. “I always wanted to live.”

Magenta wondered if that was true. There were still landmines in his head, things his mother had left. “Yeah, well… You’re a selfish son of a bitch.”

He laughed, but it was a weak sound. “From you, I take what I can get.”

She let her doubt show.

“You not knifing me is about the same as any of the others kissing me.”

That made some sense. She’d wondered, given that she’d out and out offered more than once in the early days. “Because kissing you and… the rest… mean something to them and wouldn’t--” She nodded. “That’s why it was me in public for so damned long.”

He shrugged.

For the first time in years, Magenta considered the possibility that she and Warren never were going to fuck, that he wasn’t going to want that from her. She’d thought that he was waiting for her to stop being angry, but this was strong indication that he actually knew she never would. She’d expected to have to pretend. She’d been certain that she could do that if Warren wanted it, but Ethan had been right about Warren being perceptive about people.

Warren gave her a very sweet smile. “If I thought it would be just once, if I could heal like Ethan, I’d probably give you a little time with me and a knife. With Layla to supervise.”

She’d been worried that he was actively suicidal until he added the bit about Layla. “You’re not into pain.” She was pretty sure that, if that turned Warren on, one of her friends would know by now and would have told the rest of them

“Pain’s not very important.”

Magenta didn’t often see Warren’s madness on his face, but she did right then. There was a yearning hunger in his expression that told her that he was quite serious-- Warren knew that he owned less of her than he did of the other three, and he wanted the rest.

Warren really was a shitty, stalkery asshole.

Magenta took a deep breath. “So how long are we going to sit in here?” She wrinkled her nose. “I’m going to have to wash my hair three times, at least, and, like I said, Ethan’s worried. Existential crisis blah, blah, blah.” She lifted one shoulder and let it drop again. “The kids are still who they were a week ago and who they’ll be next week. They’re not who they would have been without the Pacifier, and that is-- partly-- on you.”

Warren’s real options, given his mother, had stunk like moldy gym socks, but Magenta wasn’t going to let him off the hook, not entirely. Warren had, after all, shown himself to be extremely creative about obedience.

And forgiving Warren was never going to be Magenta’s job. Her job was to call him on his bullshit. That was why she’d come through the ducts rather than Ethan. Ethan thought that Warren facing the wrong truths would destroy them all, so he’d soften this and avoid the elephants under the carpet.

“It’s mostly on Gwen and your mother, but--” She tilted her head to the left as if considering it. “Maybe ten percent your fault?” She was pretty sure he’d never think she was lowballing because that wasn’t part of how they interacted. Except when it was. Those times only worked because he knew she wouldn’t. “You were fifteen,” she told him. “Everybody fucks up at fifteen.”

“And the four of you were fourteen.” He sounded as if he was starting to understand what that meant.

Magenta didn’t believe that he hadn’t considered it before. Not for a single second. Warren had worked too damned hard at finding the angles for their weaknesses, and them being young had been the most glaringly obvious. She wasn’t sure who they’d all have been if they’d been older, but she wished, sometimes, that they had been. Warren having that extra year on them had made a difference.

But, if they had been, probably nobody would have mistaken them for harmless and probably Layla wouldn’t have thought that Warren could help her make Will jealous.

“You’re really fucking lucky that, between the four of us, we could make one working brain. More fourteen year olds usually means more stupidity.” Magenta was pretty sure that Ethan had saved their asses on that just by being inhumanly stable. 

“What are we going to do when all of the kids are fourteen?” From the tone of his voice, Warren hadn’t actually considered that before.

Magenta found a charred fragment of something that hadn’t burned completely and threw it at him. “Neither the time or place. We’ve got a decade.”

Warren let the bit of debris hit him and laughed again. He still didn’t quite sound as if he meant it, but Magenta thought it was a good sign. Warren’s face went still for a moment. Then he said, “You do realize that I love all four of you, right?”

She nodded because she did know. They all did. They just also all knew that Warren’s love wasn’t any sort of protection if they didn’t keep it. “Won’t help us at all if you kill yourself.” She wasn’t going to offer a declaration in return because she wasn’t entirely sure whether she’d be lying or stating the obvious. It might even be both.

Ethan still said that Warren was ‘dangerously perceptive,’ so maybe Warren already knew.


End file.
